More seriously, the Russians must know by now that they’re stuffed. Black Sea fleet on it’s way to being completely destroyed as a viable force, the entirety of their Soviet arsenal chewed up into pieces in the fields of Ukraine, along with the flower of both their infantry & cavalry. The only thing keeping them going is a stubborn refusal to admit the inevitable. Still, something might turn up for them I guess - a Trump 2024 victory perhaps? It seems hope is all they have left & hope is not a wining strategy.
There was recent speculation about a winning strategy for Russia. Wait for winter then destroy Ukraine's energy infrastructure. OK, it is probably a war crime but will Putin care?
With what armaments? They tried that last winter & Ukraine has better air defences now than it did then.
IIRC Russia was meant to run out of missiles in october 2022. Whatever happened to that prediction?
I didn't read Phil's point as being about number of missiles but nature of missiles. Given Russia tried to destroy Ukraine's energy infrastructure last year, with limited success, and Ukraine has strengthened its air defences, presumably Russia would need to have gained access to more sophisticated weapons over the past 12 months. Maybe they have, but I doubt Kim brought them in his little train.
I actually agree with this. Russia tried exactly this last year - destroying Ukraine’s infra - and it didn’t work. I see no reason why it should work a second time around
But this is my point. I am - despite what half of you believe - not predicting a Russian victory. It seems pretty unlikely. However at the same time I cannot see how Ukraine can drive Russia back to the 2014 borders especially if that means reclaiming Crimea. Not gonna happen
Two caveats.
The Ukrainian attack on Russia proper has potential. If they can seriously degrade Russian military and morale that way, that might change the game. But they need megatons of weapons
Kadyrov’s death is also ‘interesting’. Perhaps Ukes could take out Putin. That would alter everything
As for Russia. How can they win? Perhaps a lightning strike on Kyiv from the north, as they first intended. Not exactly easy, however
Or they go postal and drop a tactical nuke and the war freezes, instantly, and an armistice is signed with the frontiers where they are now
The Russians will not be able to mount a surprise attack on Kyiv a 2nd time. The Ukrainians would bomb any massed force to small pieces the moment they tried to assemble it, border or not.
The Russian hold on Crimea depends on them holding the left bank of the Dnipro. If the Ukrainians do succeed in pushing them out of the south, then they gain fire control over all the routes available to supply Crimea.
A frozen conflict is certainly possible but is not, at this point, anything like a certainty.
If the Russians want to piss absolutely everyone off then dropping a nuke on Kyiv would certainly do that. Can’t see it myself - it’s a table flipping move that directly risks the homeland: Nothing would be off the cards once they’d crossed that line.
I also feel the Kyiv (or Odesa or similar) nuke is highly unlikely; a little less unlikely (though still improbable) would be some tactical nuclear shenanigans on an infrastructure target or something.
I wonder if a nuclear order would actually be carried out, or if that would precipitate 'internal struggles'.
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
There are some small changes that shouldn’t be too controversial and the EU would likely agree with . A large scale re-negotiation I agree is out of the question.
Ergo, one way or another, Starmer is lying. Not for the first time
He said he’d like to re-write the deal . We don’t know what if any changes are possible until we get to that point . Not sure it’s fair to accuse him of lying . The EU has a lot more goodwill towards Labour than the handmaidens of Brexit.
If you rule out SM/CU then the golden goose was really Horizon and Sunak has already plucked it. It may be possible to have more trusted trader schemes etc but that will make very little difference to 99.9% of the population.
Starmer made remarks about ‘getting a better EU deal for my kids’ and to me that means, probably, restoring some kind of Free Movement
I do wonder if he will go for it
Some sort of freedom of movement might be possible. The reality is that this exists already. I was doing a trial recently where one of the charges was attempting to pervert the course of justice. The accused was an Algerian but had been living here pretending to have been French (using false documents) and pretending to be covered by the transitional provisions applicable at the time of Brexit. Millions of people were granted such rights with very little inquiry and it does not take a lot of imagination to conclude that a fair number of these will have been for those wanting to sell a package of documentation to the likes of that Algerian.
I largely agree. I never had issues with Free Movement and it is now clear - as has been said on here - that neither party has any intention (or ability?) to really tackle mass immigration
So it is arguable we might as well get the benefits of the Single Market - perhaps
Pretty soon all the parties will be doing things to tackle mass immigration.
Not while the parties are convinced we need immigration to fill low-skilled jobs workshy Brits refuse, to do highly-skilled jobs like doctors and nurses that we don't train enough of and to counter the demographic timebomb. Something something Japan.
Truly back to 2015
Perhaps. But I await someone to propose an alternative: 1 Too many Brits are workshy. We have an attitude problem as a workforce compared to so many from eastern Europe and elsewhere. Despite a positive push of people out of the UK after Brexit, Brits haven't filled these jobs because they don't want them and never did. 2 Where we need skilled workers, we don't want to invest in training them. Things like the nursing bursary being cut are wholly counter-productive. "we can't afford it" ignores the costs of not having it, as usual. 3 I get repeatedly assured by PB Brexiteers that the likes of fruit farms should automate. Except that they can't because they don't have the money and the industry is financially a basket case. We have scrapped the hated CAP and replaced it with nothing. Farmers hated being told what to do for the money, voted to leave, and now have all the freedom but no actual money
Alternative: Pay people more.
If people are paid more then they will apply to do those jobs they don't want to do at shit wages (1).
If people are paid more and treated professionally, they'll get engaged with training (2).
If there's no money for training or investment then the businesses that are failing should go bust and someone else should be able to buy the land for a song and invest in productivity, whether it be investment in automation or investment in training professionals paid a decent salary.
If you're unproductive, you have no divine right for the government to solve your problems for you. That's a "you" problem.
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
There are some small changes that shouldn’t be too controversial and the EU would likely agree with . A large scale re-negotiation I agree is out of the question.
Ergo, one way or another, Starmer is lying. Not for the first time
He said he’d like to re-write the deal . We don’t know what if any changes are possible until we get to that point . Not sure it’s fair to accuse him of lying . The EU has a lot more goodwill towards Labour than the handmaidens of Brexit.
If you rule out SM/CU then the golden goose was really Horizon and Sunak has already plucked it. It may be possible to have more trusted trader schemes etc but that will make very little difference to 99.9% of the population.
Starmer made remarks about ‘getting a better EU deal for my kids’ and to me that means, probably, restoring some kind of Free Movement
I do wonder if he will go for it
Some sort of freedom of movement might be possible. The reality is that this exists already. I was doing a trial recently where one of the charges was attempting to pervert the course of justice. The accused was an Algerian but had been living here pretending to have been French (using false documents) and pretending to be covered by the transitional provisions applicable at the time of Brexit. Millions of people were granted such rights with very little inquiry and it does not take a lot of imagination to conclude that a fair number of these will have been for those wanting to sell a package of documentation to the likes of that Algerian.
I largely agree. I never had issues with Free Movement and it is now clear - as has been said on here - that neither party has any intention (or ability?) to really tackle mass immigration
So it is arguable we might as well get the benefits of the Single Market - perhaps
Pretty soon all the parties will be doing things to tackle mass immigration.
Not while the parties are convinced we need immigration to fill low-skilled jobs workshy Brits refuse, to do highly-skilled jobs like doctors and nurses that we don't train enough of and to counter the demographic timebomb. Something something Japan.
Truly back to 2015
Perhaps. But I await someone to propose an alternative: 1 Too many Brits are workshy. We have an attitude problem as a workforce compared to so many from eastern Europe and elsewhere. Despite a positive push of people out of the UK after Brexit, Brits haven't filled these jobs because they don't want them and never did. 2 Where we need skilled workers, we don't want to invest in training them. Things like the nursing bursary being cut are wholly counter-productive. "we can't afford it" ignores the costs of not having it, as usual. 3 I get repeatedly assured by PB Brexiteers that the likes of fruit farms should automate. Except that they can't because they don't have the money and the industry is financially a basket case. We have scrapped the hated CAP and replaced it with nothing. Farmers hated being told what to do for the money, voted to leave, and now have all the freedom but no actual money
Reminds me of this line from Full Metal Jacket, on the north Vietnamese stubbornly refusing to be liberated: "They'd rather be alive than free, I guess. Poor dumb bastards."
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
As I said earlier joining the single market is the only way to change the EU, and anything else is cosmetic
And at the moment raising that issue is certain to rouse latent Brexit support from its slumber. Single Market is Freedom Of Movement. Single Market is putting all of those terrible Euroregulations back into British Law.
Personally, I'd be fine with that. I'd even be fine if we fully aligned indefinitely and waited for a monthly email from Brussels telling us what new stuff they've come up with for us. (The freedoms at a personal level seem worth it to me.) But it would send the right, and the press, dolally, and Starmer isn't going to touch the button marked "Pressing This Button Is Incredibly Risky". There are enough people who hate all that to give Rishi a liferaft he doesn't deserve.
It's going to be like I said in 2020.
The next thing we try, 2025ish, will be a TCA that realistically co-operates on trade. Vet agreements, standards marking, that sort of thing. It will help a bit, but no- not much. That looks like Starmer's plan. But he won't be PM forever.
Beyond that, it gets speculative, anything might happen, but I haven't seen anything to change my rough schedule.
Single Market will be 2030ish. We can probably chuck in some Union of Customs as well. The Brit deals aren't coming out with anything special, and we can leave CPTPP with six months notice.
And then, who knows? Maybe the UK will be fine tagging along with whatever Brussels says. A lot of it is boring technical stuff, and there is the possibility of being consulted. A bit. I don't think the UK political classes are going to be happy with that, which is why Rejoin might happen, but only under a new generation of politicians.
All a bit rubbish, because the UK is gently bleeding under the current arrangements. But I wouldn't have started here.
But we’re not gently bleeding. We are growing faster than Germany and about the same speed as France
Britain is not in a great position but neither is much of Europe, or, indeed, the world
98% of our problems have nothing to do with Brexit and many of them are down to chronic, self inflicted stupidity and a dysfunctional government and civil service - eg HS2
Oh for goodness sake even if we were roaring away successful and Europe was going off a cliff edge that doesn't mean Brexit is successful. You have to compare what you have gained to what you have lost, not compare us with another country and go 'look they are having problems too'. About the only thing you did get right there is it isn't all about Brexit. There are lots of other stuff that has an impact making your observation utterly pointless. You can only look at the gains and losses.
So the question is has the improvements in exporting and importing to the rest of the world greater than the loss in importing and exporting to Europe. To my mind the answer to that question is very very clear.
If not do the freedoms/restrictions of being outside of Europe in other areas outweigh the freedoms/restrictions of being in Europe. And the answer to that question in my mind is even clearer.
How many times can we repeat this argument? For me, Brexit is Brexit
Regaining sovereignty and proper democracy is really all that I cared about. That’s been done. So for me it is a success. I understand that you differ
What about Britain out of the EU makes it a "proper democracy"? A party that fails to win a majority of votes can still receive a majority of seats. An individual seat is still won by FPTP. Our Commons is still whipped and cajoled by the leadership, and very few votes fall outside of that. A political consensus that drips from the media and tufton street still holds sway. Indeed, the two major parties of government have very little policy differences between them - one of them offering a shit future administered poorly and the other one offering a shit future administered efficiently.
The biggest single win from Brexit has been preventing politicans doing things which they may or may not want to do and saying "EU rules, nothing we can do other than comply".
I'd vote for Brexit again tomorrow, regardless of economic cost, in order to prevent them getting that nasty little figleaf back (most of the time it was things they wanted to do, but the public wouldn't wear). A democracy where the top elected politicans can plausibly claim they are being made to do things the voters don't want by a higher power is not a proper democracy by any standard.
La Truss has been giving her speech today. She was the top elected politician, tried to do something, and was forced instead to do things that voters don't want by a higher power.
So Britain needs to leave the international money markets. Take Back Control of our lives by going back to simpler times where we simply took the things we wanted and sent a gunboat to shoot anyone who thought that was a bad idea.
The 'international money markets' have decided that Sunak's way is twice as shit as Truss's way.
In what way? I don't want to defend Sunak/Hunt too vehemently, but the pound is a fair bit stronger than it was with Truss/Kwarteng at the helm, and the Bank of England hasn't needed to come in with a multi-billion pound package to stave off an imminent collapse in pension funds. It's not a high bar, but they do appear to have cleared it.
More seriously, the Russians must know by now that they’re stuffed. Black Sea fleet on it’s way to being completely destroyed as a viable force, the entirety of their Soviet arsenal chewed up into pieces in the fields of Ukraine, along with the flower of both their infantry & cavalry. The only thing keeping them going is a stubborn refusal to admit the inevitable. Still, something might turn up for them I guess - a Trump 2024 victory perhaps? It seems hope is all they have left & hope is not a wining strategy.
There was recent speculation about a winning strategy for Russia. Wait for winter then destroy Ukraine's energy infrastructure. OK, it is probably a war crime but will Putin care?
With what armaments? They tried that last winter & Ukraine has better air defences now than it did then.
IIRC Russia was meant to run out of missiles in october 2022. Whatever happened to that prediction?
Russia has been able to produce more new missiles than expected, because sanctions have been less effective than hoped. Yes, not all predictions are right, and Russia is also fighting the war and has a say in how it develops.
Not that it does them much good. Very few Russian missiles now hit a target because Ukrainian air defences are much improved.
But on the other hand, there is some truth in the 'run out of missiles' line. If you compare current rates of firing by the Russians to those in the early days, then it's clear they're either very low on stocks, or they're holding some back for a blitz attack to overwhelm Ukrainian defences.
Also, there are reports that components of the missiles being fired at the moment are fairly recent, having been made in the last few years. Basically, they're not firing off stocks, but ones they're building now. And that does limit them.
Also remember that one of Russia's supposed strengths was the depth of its ex-Soviet stocks.
The latest Perun video goes into this wrt tanks and planes. Basically, whilst Russia are taking new production of equipment seriously, they do have limited capabilities. But it's nowhere near enough. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctrtAwT2sgs
Yes, the reports are that the long-range missiles in particular, are being used as quickly as they can be assembled. Most of the very modern stuff requires electronics subject to sanctions, and they never thought they’d need to make barrels and ammo for old T-72 tanks and similar-vintage artillery pieces, because they already had more of it than would ever be required!
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
As I said earlier joining the single market is the only way to change the EU, and anything else is cosmetic
And at the moment raising that issue is certain to rouse latent Brexit support from its slumber. Single Market is Freedom Of Movement. Single Market is putting all of those terrible Euroregulations back into British Law.
Personally, I'd be fine with that. I'd even be fine if we fully aligned indefinitely and waited for a monthly email from Brussels telling us what new stuff they've come up with for us. (The freedoms at a personal level seem worth it to me.) But it would send the right, and the press, dolally, and Starmer isn't going to touch the button marked "Pressing This Button Is Incredibly Risky". There are enough people who hate all that to give Rishi a liferaft he doesn't deserve.
It's going to be like I said in 2020.
The next thing we try, 2025ish, will be a TCA that realistically co-operates on trade. Vet agreements, standards marking, that sort of thing. It will help a bit, but no- not much. That looks like Starmer's plan. But he won't be PM forever.
Beyond that, it gets speculative, anything might happen, but I haven't seen anything to change my rough schedule.
Single Market will be 2030ish. We can probably chuck in some Union of Customs as well. The Brit deals aren't coming out with anything special, and we can leave CPTPP with six months notice.
And then, who knows? Maybe the UK will be fine tagging along with whatever Brussels says. A lot of it is boring technical stuff, and there is the possibility of being consulted. A bit. I don't think the UK political classes are going to be happy with that, which is why Rejoin might happen, but only under a new generation of politicians.
All a bit rubbish, because the UK is gently bleeding under the current arrangements. But I wouldn't have started here.
But we’re not gently bleeding. We are growing faster than Germany and about the same speed as France
Britain is not in a great position but neither is much of Europe, or, indeed, the world
98% of our problems have nothing to do with Brexit and many of them are down to chronic, self inflicted stupidity and a dysfunctional government and civil service - eg HS2
Oh for goodness sake even if we were roaring away successful and Europe was going off a cliff edge that doesn't mean Brexit is successful. You have to compare what you have gained to what you have lost, not compare us with another country and go 'look they are having problems too'. About the only thing you did get right there is it isn't all about Brexit. There are lots of other stuff that has an impact making your observation utterly pointless. You can only look at the gains and losses.
So the question is has the improvements in exporting and importing to the rest of the world greater than the loss in importing and exporting to Europe. To my mind the answer to that question is very very clear.
If not do the freedoms/restrictions of being outside of Europe in other areas outweigh the freedoms/restrictions of being in Europe. And the answer to that question in my mind is even clearer.
How many times can we repeat this argument? For me, Brexit is Brexit
Regaining sovereignty and proper democracy is really all that I cared about. That’s been done. So for me it is a success. I understand that you differ
What about Britain out of the EU makes it a "proper democracy"? A party that fails to win a majority of votes can still receive a majority of seats. An individual seat is still won by FPTP. Our Commons is still whipped and cajoled by the leadership, and very few votes fall outside of that. A political consensus that drips from the media and tufton street still holds sway. Indeed, the two major parties of government have very little policy differences between them - one of them offering a shit future administered poorly and the other one offering a shit future administered efficiently.
The biggest single win from Brexit has been preventing politicans doing things which they may or may not want to do and saying "EU rules, nothing we can do other than comply".
I'd vote for Brexit again tomorrow, regardless of economic cost, in order to prevent them getting that nasty little figleaf back (most of the time it was things they wanted to do, but the public wouldn't wear). A democracy where the top elected politicans can plausibly claim they are being made to do things the voters don't want by a higher power is not a proper democracy by any standard.
La Truss has been giving her speech today. She was the top elected politician, tried to do something, and was forced instead to do things that voters don't want by a higher power.
So Britain needs to leave the international money markets. Take Back Control of our lives by going back to simpler times where we simply took the things we wanted and sent a gunboat to shoot anyone who thought that was a bad idea.
The 'international money markets' have decided that Sunak's way is twice as shit as Truss's way.
In what way? I don't want to defend Sunak/Hunt too vehemently, but the pound is a fair bit stronger than it was with Truss/Kwarteng at the helm, and the Bank of England hasn't needed to come in with a multi-billion pound package to stave off an imminent collapse in pension funds. It's not a high bar, but they do appear to have cleared it.
The Bank of England didn't come in with a multi-billion package for Truss either. They effectively rolled back a part of their catastrophically dumb Quantitative Tightening they announced at about the same time as the mini-Budget either.
Net over that period the BoE were tightening things, not loosening them, as the media portrayed.
Truss's problems were far more media management than economic. She was stupid to bundle her ambitions in at the same time as the energy bailout, and the same time as the Bank were announcing tightening, as the markets would have reacted either way - but by headlining with what was actually some pretty minor changes to taxes which could and should have waited for a proper Budget she took ownership of the whole disaster.
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
As I said earlier joining the single market is the only way to change the EU, and anything else is cosmetic
And at the moment raising that issue is certain to rouse latent Brexit support from its slumber. Single Market is Freedom Of Movement. Single Market is putting all of those terrible Euroregulations back into British Law.
Personally, I'd be fine with that. I'd even be fine if we fully aligned indefinitely and waited for a monthly email from Brussels telling us what new stuff they've come up with for us. (The freedoms at a personal level seem worth it to me.) But it would send the right, and the press, dolally, and Starmer isn't going to touch the button marked "Pressing This Button Is Incredibly Risky". There are enough people who hate all that to give Rishi a liferaft he doesn't deserve.
It's going to be like I said in 2020.
The next thing we try, 2025ish, will be a TCA that realistically co-operates on trade. Vet agreements, standards marking, that sort of thing. It will help a bit, but no- not much. That looks like Starmer's plan. But he won't be PM forever.
Beyond that, it gets speculative, anything might happen, but I haven't seen anything to change my rough schedule.
Single Market will be 2030ish. We can probably chuck in some Union of Customs as well. The Brit deals aren't coming out with anything special, and we can leave CPTPP with six months notice.
And then, who knows? Maybe the UK will be fine tagging along with whatever Brussels says. A lot of it is boring technical stuff, and there is the possibility of being consulted. A bit. I don't think the UK political classes are going to be happy with that, which is why Rejoin might happen, but only under a new generation of politicians.
All a bit rubbish, because the UK is gently bleeding under the current arrangements. But I wouldn't have started here.
But we’re not gently bleeding. We are growing faster than Germany and about the same speed as France
Britain is not in a great position but neither is much of Europe, or, indeed, the world
98% of our problems have nothing to do with Brexit and many of them are down to chronic, self inflicted stupidity and a dysfunctional government and civil service - eg HS2
Oh for goodness sake even if we were roaring away successful and Europe was going off a cliff edge that doesn't mean Brexit is successful. You have to compare what you have gained to what you have lost, not compare us with another country and go 'look they are having problems too'. About the only thing you did get right there is it isn't all about Brexit. There are lots of other stuff that has an impact making your observation utterly pointless. You can only look at the gains and losses.
So the question is has the improvements in exporting and importing to the rest of the world greater than the loss in importing and exporting to Europe. To my mind the answer to that question is very very clear.
If not do the freedoms/restrictions of being outside of Europe in other areas outweigh the freedoms/restrictions of being in Europe. And the answer to that question in my mind is even clearer.
How many times can we repeat this argument? For me, Brexit is Brexit
Regaining sovereignty and proper democracy is really all that I cared about. That’s been done. So for me it is a success. I understand that you differ
What about Britain out of the EU makes it a "proper democracy"? A party that fails to win a majority of votes can still receive a majority of seats. An individual seat is still won by FPTP. Our Commons is still whipped and cajoled by the leadership, and very few votes fall outside of that. A political consensus that drips from the media and tufton street still holds sway. Indeed, the two major parties of government have very little policy differences between them - one of them offering a shit future administered poorly and the other one offering a shit future administered efficiently.
The biggest single win from Brexit has been preventing politicans doing things which they may or may not want to do and saying "EU rules, nothing we can do other than comply".
I'd vote for Brexit again tomorrow, regardless of economic cost, in order to prevent them getting that nasty little figleaf back (most of the time it was things they wanted to do, but the public wouldn't wear). A democracy where the top elected politicans can plausibly claim they are being made to do things the voters don't want by a higher power is not a proper democracy by any standard.
La Truss has been giving her speech today. She was the top elected politician, tried to do something, and was forced instead to do things that voters don't want by a higher power.
So Britain needs to leave the international money markets. Take Back Control of our lives by going back to simpler times where we simply took the things we wanted and sent a gunboat to shoot anyone who thought that was a bad idea.
The 'international money markets' have decided that Sunak's way is twice as shit as Truss's way.
In what way? I don't want to defend Sunak/Hunt too vehemently, but the pound is a fair bit stronger than it was with Truss/Kwarteng at the helm, and the Bank of England hasn't needed to come in with a multi-billion pound package to stave off an imminent collapse in pension funds. It's not a high bar, but they do appear to have cleared it.
My guess is that he is referring to interest rates or gilt yields. But this, amongst other things, completely ignores the international increases in both since Truss's unlamented premiership.
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
There are some small changes that shouldn’t be too controversial and the EU would likely agree with . A large scale re-negotiation I agree is out of the question.
Ergo, one way or another, Starmer is lying. Not for the first time
He said he’d like to re-write the deal . We don’t know what if any changes are possible until we get to that point . Not sure it’s fair to accuse him of lying . The EU has a lot more goodwill towards Labour than the handmaidens of Brexit.
If you rule out SM/CU then the golden goose was really Horizon and Sunak has already plucked it. It may be possible to have more trusted trader schemes etc but that will make very little difference to 99.9% of the population.
Starmer made remarks about ‘getting a better EU deal for my kids’ and to me that means, probably, restoring some kind of Free Movement
I do wonder if he will go for it
Some sort of freedom of movement might be possible. The reality is that this exists already. I was doing a trial recently where one of the charges was attempting to pervert the course of justice. The accused was an Algerian but had been living here pretending to have been French (using false documents) and pretending to be covered by the transitional provisions applicable at the time of Brexit. Millions of people were granted such rights with very little inquiry and it does not take a lot of imagination to conclude that a fair number of these will have been for those wanting to sell a package of documentation to the likes of that Algerian.
I largely agree. I never had issues with Free Movement and it is now clear - as has been said on here - that neither party has any intention (or ability?) to really tackle mass immigration
So it is arguable we might as well get the benefits of the Single Market - perhaps
Pretty soon all the parties will be doing things to tackle mass immigration.
Not while the parties are convinced we need immigration to fill low-skilled jobs workshy Brits refuse, to do highly-skilled jobs like doctors and nurses that we don't train enough of and to counter the demographic timebomb. Something something Japan.
Truly back to 2015
Perhaps. But I await someone to propose an alternative: 1 Too many Brits are workshy. We have an attitude problem as a workforce compared to so many from eastern Europe and elsewhere. Despite a positive push of people out of the UK after Brexit, Brits haven't filled these jobs because they don't want them and never did. 2 Where we need skilled workers, we don't want to invest in training them. Things like the nursing bursary being cut are wholly counter-productive. "we can't afford it" ignores the costs of not having it, as usual. 3 I get repeatedly assured by PB Brexiteers that the likes of fruit farms should automate. Except that they can't because they don't have the money and the industry is financially a basket case. We have scrapped the hated CAP and replaced it with nothing. Farmers hated being told what to do for the money, voted to leave, and now have all the freedom but no actual money
The CAP was replaced pretty much like for like. As with a host of other things.
Three and a half years of people refusing to accept the result, followed by two years of pandemic probably weren’t ideal conditions
More seriously, the Russians must know by now that they’re stuffed. Black Sea fleet on it’s way to being completely destroyed as a viable force, the entirety of their Soviet arsenal chewed up into pieces in the fields of Ukraine, along with the flower of both their infantry & cavalry. The only thing keeping them going is a stubborn refusal to admit the inevitable. Still, something might turn up for them I guess - a Trump 2024 victory perhaps? It seems hope is all they have left & hope is not a wining strategy.
There was recent speculation about a winning strategy for Russia. Wait for winter then destroy Ukraine's energy infrastructure. OK, it is probably a war crime but will Putin care?
With what armaments? They tried that last winter & Ukraine has better air defences now than it did then.
IIRC Russia was meant to run out of missiles in october 2022. Whatever happened to that prediction?
Russia has been able to produce more new missiles than expected, because sanctions have been less effective than hoped. Yes, not all predictions are right, and Russia is also fighting the war and has a say in how it develops.
Not that it does them much good. Very few Russian missiles now hit a target because Ukrainian air defences are much improved.
But on the other hand, there is some truth in the 'run out of missiles' line. If you compare current rates of firing by the Russians to those in the early days, then it's clear they're either very low on stocks, or they're holding some back for a blitz attack to overwhelm Ukrainian defences.
Also, there are reports that components of the missiles being fired at the moment are fairly recent, having been made in the last few years. Basically, they're not firing off stocks, but ones they're building now. And that does limit them.
Also remember that one of Russia's supposed strengths was the depth of its ex-Soviet stocks.
The latest Perun video goes into this wrt tanks and planes. Basically, whilst Russia are taking new production of equipment seriously, they do have limited capabilities. But it's nowhere near enough. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctrtAwT2sgs
Yes, the reports are that the long-range missiles in particular, are being used as quickly as they can be assembled. Most of the very modern stuff requires electronics subject to sanctions, and they never thought they’d need to make barrels and ammo for old T-72 tanks and similar-vintage artillery pieces, because they already had more of it than would ever be required!
The other issue is that Ukraine did incredibly well last year (and Russia incredibly badly allowed it to happen) in destroying munition storage.
They were bringing in trainload of munitions, keeping them close to the train station, then the entire lot were getting blown up by Ukrainian missiles.
Ammunition getting destroyed in storage means a much, much faster depletion in stocks than they'd probably accounted for.
More seriously, the Russians must know by now that they’re stuffed. Black Sea fleet on it’s way to being completely destroyed as a viable force, the entirety of their Soviet arsenal chewed up into pieces in the fields of Ukraine, along with the flower of both their infantry & cavalry. The only thing keeping them going is a stubborn refusal to admit the inevitable. Still, something might turn up for them I guess - a Trump 2024 victory perhaps? It seems hope is all they have left & hope is not a wining strategy.
On the other hand the great Ukrainian counter-offensive has been a terrifically expensive failure, chewing up tens of thousands of men to gain about 3 villages. Where is the oft-promised breakthrough? The severing of Russia’s land bridge to Crimea?
It’s not happening, is it? We are now in mid September and it all grinds on, pointlessly
Russia cannot win this war (without Trump) but nor, I fear, can Ukraine
They have a breakthrough in southern Ukraine. It’s painstaking work and doesn’t make for good TV so you judge it a failure
They don’t have a breakthrough. From today’s Guardian
“Earlier Maliar had issued a lengthy update on Telegram, claiming that Ukrainian forces have repelled Russian attacks in a number of areas, including in the Kupyansk, Bakhmut, and Marinka directions. Maliar also gave new figures for the amount of territory recaptured by Ukraine. She said 2 sq km had been captured around Bakhmut, and in the past week, and that 51 sq km had been recaptured there since the start of the counteroffensive“
51sq km. That’s about two London boroughs. Maybe 6km by 9km. At a cost of 10,000 men? 20,000? And it’s taken months
Face it, this is not working
They’ve also just sacked 6 defence ministers, which says something in itself
I'm not sure what you expect?
There's no magic way to win a war. You have to destroy the enemy army. Before you have done this they will be able to resist and hold ground.
I think there's decent evidence that Ukraine are inflicting greater losses then they are suffering, and so, if they are inflicting losses on Russia more quickly then Russia can replace those losses, they will eventually reach a point where Russia is unable to defend the current front line. But this will necessarily take time and it will look like not much progress is made while it plays out.
Meanwhile, for example, we can see that Ukraine is able to attack valuable Russians assets almost at will, whole Russia is unable to enforce it's blockade of Ukrainian ports.
Probably the wrong analogy, but in the first world war the British fought an epic battle on the Somme and then a year later another at Passchendaele, both often regarded as at best pyrrhic victories. Yet both were instrumental in the weakening and ultimate defeat of the Imperial German Army. The Somme was described as 'the muddy grave of the German Army' and resulted in the withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line in 1917. After Passchendaele a German general staff publication had "Germany had been brought near to certain destruction (sicheren Untergang) by the Flanders battle of 1917".
Yet after both battles, I suspect @Leon would have been calling them failures.
I cannot see the future, but I think the danger of Russia 'winning' in Ukraine is gone, and its now all about whether Russia can be ejected fully (and at what cost) or if Putin finally gets replaced. Regimes can fall very fast at the end.
It's not a terrible analogy, because it highlights that the enemy army has to be destroyed in order to defeat it, but there are key differences.
The most important is that Ukraine has an advantage with key weapons - drones, HIMARS, Storm Shadow, etc - which means they can destroy the Russian army with considerably less losses than that suffered by the British and French in WWI.
But another key difference is that the combined populations of France and Britain, and the British and French empires, vastly exceeded the population of the kaiser’s Germany. In brutal terms, the western powers could afford to lose more men than Berlin, in the end. And then the Americans joined in, tilting it even further
That is very much not the case here. The Russian population is 3x that of Ukraine
In a brutal war of attrition, this basic maths matters. I also dispute that Ukraine is losing fewer men now, than Russia. Ukraine is on the offensive, that is always more expensive in lives than defence
& yet the North Vietnamese defeated the French & USA, despite their relatively puny size.
Only because the US and French ultimately gave up and the North Vietnamese were defending their homeland as the Ukranians are from Russia
More seriously, the Russians must know by now that they’re stuffed. Black Sea fleet on it’s way to being completely destroyed as a viable force, the entirety of their Soviet arsenal chewed up into pieces in the fields of Ukraine, along with the flower of both their infantry & cavalry. The only thing keeping them going is a stubborn refusal to admit the inevitable. Still, something might turn up for them I guess - a Trump 2024 victory perhaps? It seems hope is all they have left & hope is not a wining strategy.
On the other hand the great Ukrainian counter-offensive has been a terrifically expensive failure, chewing up tens of thousands of men to gain about 3 villages. Where is the oft-promised breakthrough? The severing of Russia’s land bridge to Crimea?
It’s not happening, is it? We are now in mid September and it all grinds on, pointlessly
Russia cannot win this war (without Trump) but nor, I fear, can Ukraine
They have a breakthrough in southern Ukraine. It’s painstaking work and doesn’t make for good TV so you judge it a failure
They don’t have a breakthrough. From today’s Guardian
“Earlier Maliar had issued a lengthy update on Telegram, claiming that Ukrainian forces have repelled Russian attacks in a number of areas, including in the Kupyansk, Bakhmut, and Marinka directions. Maliar also gave new figures for the amount of territory recaptured by Ukraine. She said 2 sq km had been captured around Bakhmut, and in the past week, and that 51 sq km had been recaptured there since the start of the counteroffensive“
51sq km. That’s about two London boroughs. Maybe 6km by 9km. At a cost of 10,000 men? 20,000? And it’s taken months
Face it, this is not working
They’ve also just sacked 6 defence ministers, which says something in itself
I'm not sure what you expect?
There's no magic way to win a war. You have to destroy the enemy army. Before you have done this they will be able to resist and hold ground.
I think there's decent evidence that Ukraine are inflicting greater losses then they are suffering, and so, if they are inflicting losses on Russia more quickly then Russia can replace those losses, they will eventually reach a point where Russia is unable to defend the current front line. But this will necessarily take time and it will look like not much progress is made while it plays out.
Meanwhile, for example, we can see that Ukraine is able to attack valuable Russians assets almost at will, whole Russia is unable to enforce it's blockade of Ukrainian ports.
Probably the wrong analogy, but in the first world war the British fought an epic battle on the Somme and then a year later another at Passchendaele, both often regarded as at best pyrrhic victories. Yet both were instrumental in the weakening and ultimate defeat of the Imperial German Army. The Somme was described as 'the muddy grave of the German Army' and resulted in the withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line in 1917. After Passchendaele a German general staff publication had "Germany had been brought near to certain destruction (sicheren Untergang) by the Flanders battle of 1917".
Yet after both battles, I suspect @Leon would have been calling them failures.
I cannot see the future, but I think the danger of Russia 'winning' in Ukraine is gone, and its now all about whether Russia can be ejected fully (and at what cost) or if Putin finally gets replaced. Regimes can fall very fast at the end.
It's not a terrible analogy, because it highlights that the enemy army has to be destroyed in order to defeat it, but there are key differences.
The most important is that Ukraine has an advantage with key weapons - drones, HIMARS, Storm Shadow, etc - which means they can destroy the Russian army with considerably less losses than that suffered by the British and French in WWI.
But another key difference is that the combined populations of France and Britain, and the British and French empires, vastly exceeded the population of the kaiser’s Germany. In brutal terms, the western powers could afford to lose more men than Berlin, in the end. And then the Americans joined in, tilting it even further
That is very much not the case here. The Russian population is 3x that of Ukraine
In a brutal war of attrition, this basic maths matters. I also dispute that Ukraine is losing fewer men now, than Russia. Ukraine is on the offensive, that is always more expensive in lives than defence
Ukraine haven't made many direct assaults of the kind that we saw in early June, where we saw damaged Leopard tanks. If they had we would be seeing the photos of it from the Russians. They've deliberately been fighting in a way to minimise casualties. It also sounds like the western kit might not be magic in terms of forcing a breakthrough, but does a great job on saving lives. The Ukrainian tank crews are walking away from most of Western armoured vehicles when they're damaged or destroyed.
So I think it's quite plausible that Ukrainian casualties are lower than Russian.
Also, number of soldiers dead is not likely to be the determinant of Russia reaching a breaking point. Running out of military equipment will come first. This is why Ukraine's success in the artillery war is so important.
Soviet doctrine for their military vehicles was to make as many of them as possible given their large population. As a result their prioritised production over things such as crew protection. This has carried on over into current Russian thinking. The crew of a Russian tank or armoured vehicle is very unlikely to survive. Whereas in the West we realised the need to protect valuable crews an d made smaller numbers of vehicles that prioritised crew safety. As I understand it most crews in knocked out western vehicles have survived.
Ukraine learnt very quickly from one early offensive in June that it couldn't just charge a load of Western tanks/IFVs at Russian defences. They have since been waging a war of attrition against Russia. It is slow but it does seem to be working. Russia has less and less gear even if it still does have lots of manpower. The gear that it has is of car worse quality than what it could use at the start of the war.
Even in manpower it is becoming a struggle for Russia. They are now manning their defence with elite offensive units. Why would they do this unless they had no other choice? Those units will not be used again for offensive operations.
Ukraine is also becoming more and more adapt with its long range weapons. The Black Sea is almost a no-go area now for Russian warships as has been seen over the last week.
It is a long process but I do not see many positives for Russia. It is bloody for Ukraine but things are slowly moving in their direction.
More seriously, the Russians must know by now that they’re stuffed. Black Sea fleet on it’s way to being completely destroyed as a viable force, the entirety of their Soviet arsenal chewed up into pieces in the fields of Ukraine, along with the flower of both their infantry & cavalry. The only thing keeping them going is a stubborn refusal to admit the inevitable. Still, something might turn up for them I guess - a Trump 2024 victory perhaps? It seems hope is all they have left & hope is not a wining strategy.
There was recent speculation about a winning strategy for Russia. Wait for winter then destroy Ukraine's energy infrastructure. OK, it is probably a war crime but will Putin care?
With what armaments? They tried that last winter & Ukraine has better air defences now than it did then.
IIRC Russia was meant to run out of missiles in october 2022. Whatever happened to that prediction?
I didn't read Phil's point as being about number of missiles but nature of missiles. Given Russia tried to destroy Ukraine's energy infrastructure last year, with limited success, and Ukraine has strengthened its air defences, presumably Russia would need to have gained access to more sophisticated weapons over the past 12 months. Maybe they have, but I doubt Kim brought them in his little train.
I actually agree with this. Russia tried exactly this last year - destroying Ukraine’s infra - and it didn’t work. I see no reason why it should work a second time around
But this is my point. I am - despite what half of you believe - not predicting a Russian victory. It seems pretty unlikely. However at the same time I cannot see how Ukraine can drive Russia back to the 2014 borders especially if that means reclaiming Crimea. Not gonna happen
Two caveats.
The Ukrainian attack on Russia proper has potential. If they can seriously degrade Russian military and morale that way, that might change the game. But they need megatons of weapons
Kadyrov’s death is also ‘interesting’. Perhaps Ukes could take out Putin. That would alter everything
As for Russia. How can they win? Perhaps a lightning strike on Kyiv from the north, as they first intended. Not exactly easy, however
Or they go postal and drop a tactical nuke and the war freezes, instantly, and an armistice is signed with the frontiers where they are now
The Russians will not be able to mount a surprise attack on Kyiv a 2nd time. The Ukrainians would bomb any massed force to small pieces the moment they tried to assemble it, border or not.
The Russian hold on Crimea depends on them holding the left bank of the Dnipro. If the Ukrainians do succeed in pushing them out of the south, then they gain fire control over all the routes available to supply Crimea.
A frozen conflict is certainly possible but is not, at this point, anything like a certainty.
If the Russians want to piss absolutely everyone off then dropping a nuke on Kyiv would certainly do that. Can’t see it myself - it’s a table flipping move that directly risks the homeland: Nothing would be off the cards once they’d crossed that line.
I also feel the Kyiv (or Odesa or similar) nuke is highly unlikely; a little less unlikely (though still improbable) would be some tactical nuclear shenanigans on an infrastructure target or something.
I wonder if a nuclear order would actually be carried out, or if that would precipitate 'internal struggles'.
Those in the chain of command, especially at the launch sites, would know exactly how these things play out in the very short term, which won’t be good news for themselves or their families if a missile actually gets launched.
My working assumption, would be that every Ukranian and international air defence would launch to intercept the missile, including NATO assets. If there was actually a hit from a small nuclear bomb, then we have WWIII and NATO responds accordingly, probably with an immediate but conventional strike on a predetermined list of Russian military targets, that includes nuclear bases, the Black Sea fleet, and government buildings in Moscow.
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
As I said earlier joining the single market is the only way to change the EU, and anything else is cosmetic
And at the moment raising that issue is certain to rouse latent Brexit support from its slumber. Single Market is Freedom Of Movement. Single Market is putting all of those terrible Euroregulations back into British Law.
Personally, I'd be fine with that. I'd even be fine if we fully aligned indefinitely and waited for a monthly email from Brussels telling us what new stuff they've come up with for us. (The freedoms at a personal level seem worth it to me.) But it would send the right, and the press, dolally, and Starmer isn't going to touch the button marked "Pressing This Button Is Incredibly Risky". There are enough people who hate all that to give Rishi a liferaft he doesn't deserve.
It's going to be like I said in 2020.
The next thing we try, 2025ish, will be a TCA that realistically co-operates on trade. Vet agreements, standards marking, that sort of thing. It will help a bit, but no- not much. That looks like Starmer's plan. But he won't be PM forever.
Beyond that, it gets speculative, anything might happen, but I haven't seen anything to change my rough schedule.
Single Market will be 2030ish. We can probably chuck in some Union of Customs as well. The Brit deals aren't coming out with anything special, and we can leave CPTPP with six months notice.
And then, who knows? Maybe the UK will be fine tagging along with whatever Brussels says. A lot of it is boring technical stuff, and there is the possibility of being consulted. A bit. I don't think the UK political classes are going to be happy with that, which is why Rejoin might happen, but only under a new generation of politicians.
All a bit rubbish, because the UK is gently bleeding under the current arrangements. But I wouldn't have started here.
But we’re not gently bleeding. We are growing faster than Germany and about the same speed as France
Britain is not in a great position but neither is much of Europe, or, indeed, the world
98% of our problems have nothing to do with Brexit and many of them are down to chronic, self inflicted stupidity and a dysfunctional government and civil service - eg HS2
Oh for goodness sake even if we were roaring away successful and Europe was going off a cliff edge that doesn't mean Brexit is successful. You have to compare what you have gained to what you have lost, not compare us with another country and go 'look they are having problems too'. About the only thing you did get right there is it isn't all about Brexit. There are lots of other stuff that has an impact making your observation utterly pointless. You can only look at the gains and losses.
So the question is has the improvements in exporting and importing to the rest of the world greater than the loss in importing and exporting to Europe. To my mind the answer to that question is very very clear.
If not do the freedoms/restrictions of being outside of Europe in other areas outweigh the freedoms/restrictions of being in Europe. And the answer to that question in my mind is even clearer.
How many times can we repeat this argument? For me, Brexit is Brexit
Regaining sovereignty and proper democracy is really all that I cared about. That’s been done. So for me it is a success. I understand that you differ
What about Britain out of the EU makes it a "proper democracy"? A party that fails to win a majority of votes can still receive a majority of seats. An individual seat is still won by FPTP. Our Commons is still whipped and cajoled by the leadership, and very few votes fall outside of that. A political consensus that drips from the media and tufton street still holds sway. Indeed, the two major parties of government have very little policy differences between them - one of them offering a shit future administered poorly and the other one offering a shit future administered efficiently.
The biggest single win from Brexit has been preventing politicans doing things which they may or may not want to do and saying "EU rules, nothing we can do other than comply".
I'd vote for Brexit again tomorrow, regardless of economic cost, in order to prevent them getting that nasty little figleaf back (most of the time it was things they wanted to do, but the public wouldn't wear). A democracy where the top elected politicans can plausibly claim they are being made to do things the voters don't want by a higher power is not a proper democracy by any standard.
La Truss has been giving her speech today. She was the top elected politician, tried to do something, and was forced instead to do things that voters don't want by a higher power.
So Britain needs to leave the international money markets. Take Back Control of our lives by going back to simpler times where we simply took the things we wanted and sent a gunboat to shoot anyone who thought that was a bad idea.
The 'international money markets' have decided that Sunak's way is twice as shit as Truss's way.
In what way? I don't want to defend Sunak/Hunt too vehemently, but the pound is a fair bit stronger than it was with Truss/Kwarteng at the helm, and the Bank of England hasn't needed to come in with a multi-billion pound package to stave off an imminent collapse in pension funds. It's not a high bar, but they do appear to have cleared it.
My guess is that he is referring to interest rates or gilt yields. But this, amongst other things, completely ignores the international increases in both since Truss's unlamented premiership.
But what's changed internationally to cause the increases since?
Part of the problem is that the markets were horribly mispriced last year. They hadn't properly accounted for the global disruptions, inflationary pressures and the cost of energy bailouts etc
And Truss's announcements started the process of pulling back the curtain on that, which led to a shock, but the shock would have happened either way. The price rises were due either way.
Truss screwed up by lumping all her stuff in with what should have been standalone pieces, and in doing so she acted as a human shield. It was stupid politics, stupid media management, more than stupid economics.
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
As I said earlier joining the single market is the only way to change the EU, and anything else is cosmetic
And at the moment raising that issue is certain to rouse latent Brexit support from its slumber. Single Market is Freedom Of Movement. Single Market is putting all of those terrible Euroregulations back into British Law.
Personally, I'd be fine with that. I'd even be fine if we fully aligned indefinitely and waited for a monthly email from Brussels telling us what new stuff they've come up with for us. (The freedoms at a personal level seem worth it to me.) But it would send the right, and the press, dolally, and Starmer isn't going to touch the button marked "Pressing This Button Is Incredibly Risky". There are enough people who hate all that to give Rishi a liferaft he doesn't deserve.
It's going to be like I said in 2020.
The next thing we try, 2025ish, will be a TCA that realistically co-operates on trade. Vet agreements, standards marking, that sort of thing. It will help a bit, but no- not much. That looks like Starmer's plan. But he won't be PM forever.
Beyond that, it gets speculative, anything might happen, but I haven't seen anything to change my rough schedule.
Single Market will be 2030ish. We can probably chuck in some Union of Customs as well. The Brit deals aren't coming out with anything special, and we can leave CPTPP with six months notice.
And then, who knows? Maybe the UK will be fine tagging along with whatever Brussels says. A lot of it is boring technical stuff, and there is the possibility of being consulted. A bit. I don't think the UK political classes are going to be happy with that, which is why Rejoin might happen, but only under a new generation of politicians.
All a bit rubbish, because the UK is gently bleeding under the current arrangements. But I wouldn't have started here.
It will certainly take Labour not only winning the next general election and winning back most of the red wall seats but having a clear poll lead for re election to risk going back into the single market and restoring free movement again
More seriously, the Russians must know by now that they’re stuffed. Black Sea fleet on it’s way to being completely destroyed as a viable force, the entirety of their Soviet arsenal chewed up into pieces in the fields of Ukraine, along with the flower of both their infantry & cavalry. The only thing keeping them going is a stubborn refusal to admit the inevitable. Still, something might turn up for them I guess - a Trump 2024 victory perhaps? It seems hope is all they have left & hope is not a wining strategy.
On the other hand the great Ukrainian counter-offensive has been a terrifically expensive failure, chewing up tens of thousands of men to gain about 3 villages. Where is the oft-promised breakthrough? The severing of Russia’s land bridge to Crimea?
It’s not happening, is it? We are now in mid September and it all grinds on, pointlessly
Russia cannot win this war (without Trump) but nor, I fear, can Ukraine
They have a breakthrough in southern Ukraine. It’s painstaking work and doesn’t make for good TV so you judge it a failure
They don’t have a breakthrough. From today’s Guardian
“Earlier Maliar had issued a lengthy update on Telegram, claiming that Ukrainian forces have repelled Russian attacks in a number of areas, including in the Kupyansk, Bakhmut, and Marinka directions. Maliar also gave new figures for the amount of territory recaptured by Ukraine. She said 2 sq km had been captured around Bakhmut, and in the past week, and that 51 sq km had been recaptured there since the start of the counteroffensive“
51sq km. That’s about two London boroughs. Maybe 6km by 9km. At a cost of 10,000 men? 20,000? And it’s taken months
Face it, this is not working
They’ve also just sacked 6 defence ministers, which says something in itself
FWIW Ukraine had a spectacular week last week, including the destruction of a submarine and a landing ship and the rout of an entire Russian Brigade, as well as advances in at least four different areas in the South, East and on the Dnipro.
Putinism is in a terrible state and Russia highly unstable, but sure its Ukraine that is on the back foot...
Leon has reverted to his usual Chicken Licken Ninnyism...
Yes, of course, for merely pointing out the facts on the ground, I am some kind of coward and a ‘fucking appeaser’ and pro Putin and wishing for Ukrainian defeat, etc
We had this debate about a month ago when I queried Ukrainian progress and I was roundly accused then of defeatism and appeasement and the like, and you all said, just wait, the breakthrough is nearly here, soon the brave Ukrainians will smash through the first line of defence and race to the Azov and cut off Crimea
And it hasn’t happened
If all you ever read is English language Twitter reportage you'd think Ukraine is pissing it in and will be at the Astoria hotel in SPb for shampanskoye and medals on New Year's Eve.
If all you ever read is Russian language Telegram output you'd think the Ukrainians are fucked and are on the verge of total collapse.
The Centrist Dad's Army on here do the former. In reality, nobody really knows what the fuck is happening. Least of all those who are getting their balls, face and knock-off Adidas trainers blown off in the mud.
More seriously, the Russians must know by now that they’re stuffed. Black Sea fleet on it’s way to being completely destroyed as a viable force, the entirety of their Soviet arsenal chewed up into pieces in the fields of Ukraine, along with the flower of both their infantry & cavalry. The only thing keeping them going is a stubborn refusal to admit the inevitable. Still, something might turn up for them I guess - a Trump 2024 victory perhaps? It seems hope is all they have left & hope is not a wining strategy.
On the other hand the great Ukrainian counter-offensive has been a terrifically expensive failure, chewing up tens of thousands of men to gain about 3 villages. Where is the oft-promised breakthrough? The severing of Russia’s land bridge to Crimea?
It’s not happening, is it? We are now in mid September and it all grinds on, pointlessly
Russia cannot win this war (without Trump) but nor, I fear, can Ukraine
They have a breakthrough in southern Ukraine. It’s painstaking work and doesn’t make for good TV so you judge it a failure
They don’t have a breakthrough. From today’s Guardian
“Earlier Maliar had issued a lengthy update on Telegram, claiming that Ukrainian forces have repelled Russian attacks in a number of areas, including in the Kupyansk, Bakhmut, and Marinka directions. Maliar also gave new figures for the amount of territory recaptured by Ukraine. She said 2 sq km had been captured around Bakhmut, and in the past week, and that 51 sq km had been recaptured there since the start of the counteroffensive“
51sq km. That’s about two London boroughs. Maybe 6km by 9km. At a cost of 10,000 men? 20,000? And it’s taken months
Face it, this is not working
They’ve also just sacked 6 defence ministers, which says something in itself
I'm not sure what you expect?
There's no magic way to win a war. You have to destroy the enemy army. Before you have done this they will be able to resist and hold ground.
I think there's decent evidence that Ukraine are inflicting greater losses then they are suffering, and so, if they are inflicting losses on Russia more quickly then Russia can replace those losses, they will eventually reach a point where Russia is unable to defend the current front line. But this will necessarily take time and it will look like not much progress is made while it plays out.
Meanwhile, for example, we can see that Ukraine is able to attack valuable Russians assets almost at will, whole Russia is unable to enforce it's blockade of Ukrainian ports.
Probably the wrong analogy, but in the first world war the British fought an epic battle on the Somme and then a year later another at Passchendaele, both often regarded as at best pyrrhic victories. Yet both were instrumental in the weakening and ultimate defeat of the Imperial German Army. The Somme was described as 'the muddy grave of the German Army' and resulted in the withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line in 1917. After Passchendaele a German general staff publication had "Germany had been brought near to certain destruction (sicheren Untergang) by the Flanders battle of 1917".
Yet after both battles, I suspect @Leon would have been calling them failures.
I cannot see the future, but I think the danger of Russia 'winning' in Ukraine is gone, and its now all about whether Russia can be ejected fully (and at what cost) or if Putin finally gets replaced. Regimes can fall very fast at the end.
It's not a terrible analogy, because it highlights that the enemy army has to be destroyed in order to defeat it, but there are key differences.
The most important is that Ukraine has an advantage with key weapons - drones, HIMARS, Storm Shadow, etc - which means they can destroy the Russian army with considerably less losses than that suffered by the British and French in WWI.
But another key difference is that the combined populations of France and Britain, and the British and French empires, vastly exceeded the population of the kaiser’s Germany. In brutal terms, the western powers could afford to lose more men than Berlin, in the end. And then the Americans joined in, tilting it even further
That is very much not the case here. The Russian population is 3x that of Ukraine
In a brutal war of attrition, this basic maths matters. I also dispute that Ukraine is losing fewer men now, than Russia. Ukraine is on the offensive, that is always more expensive in lives than defence
Ukraine haven't made many direct assaults of the kind that we saw in early June, where we saw damaged Leopard tanks. If they had we would be seeing the photos of it from the Russians. They've deliberately been fighting in a way to minimise casualties. It also sounds like the western kit might not be magic in terms of forcing a breakthrough, but does a great job on saving lives. The Ukrainian tank crews are walking away from most of Western armoured vehicles when they're damaged or destroyed.
So I think it's quite plausible that Ukrainian casualties are lower than Russian.
Also, number of soldiers dead is not likely to be the determinant of Russia reaching a breaking point. Running out of military equipment will come first. This is why Ukraine's success in the artillery war is so important.
Soviet doctrine for their military vehicles was to make as many of them as possible given their large population. As a result their prioritised production over things such as crew protection. This has carried on over into current Russian thinking. The crew of a Russian tank or armoured vehicle is very unlikely to survive. Whereas in the West we realised the need to protect valuable crews an d made smaller numbers of vehicles that prioritised crew safety. As I understand it most crews in knocked out western vehicles have survived.
Ukraine learnt very quickly from one early offensive in June that it couldn't just charge a load of Western tanks/IFVs at Russian defences. They have since been waging a war of attrition against Russia. It is slow but it does seem to be working. Russia has less and less gear even if it still does have lots of manpower. The gear that it has is of car worse quality than what it could use at the start of the war.
Even in manpower it is becoming a struggle for Russia. They are now manning their defence with elite offensive units. Why would they do this unless they had no other choice? Those units will not be used again for offensive operations.
Ukraine is also becoming more and more adapt with its long range weapons. The Black Sea is almost a no-go area now for Russian warships as has been seen over the last week.
It is a long process but I do not see many positives for Russia. It is bloody for Ukraine but things are slowly moving in their direction.
Well said.
The other issue is what is going to change things now?
As long as the West keeps supporting Ukraine, their supply of modern infrastructure and superior equipment and logistics should keep them escalating their advantage over Russia.
What's going to change things in Russia's favour?
About the only thing I can see that would is a change of POTUS, but we're about a year and a half from that impacting on the battlefield.
How about we make the departing PM honours time limited and proportional to the length of the PMs stay?
Say 3x the length of the stay. So a Thatcher or Blair honour lasts 30 odd years, Cameron 16 years, Brown, May or Boris 10 years and Truss just under 5 months.
More seriously, the Russians must know by now that they’re stuffed. Black Sea fleet on it’s way to being completely destroyed as a viable force, the entirety of their Soviet arsenal chewed up into pieces in the fields of Ukraine, along with the flower of both their infantry & cavalry. The only thing keeping them going is a stubborn refusal to admit the inevitable. Still, something might turn up for them I guess - a Trump 2024 victory perhaps? It seems hope is all they have left & hope is not a wining strategy.
On the other hand the great Ukrainian counter-offensive has been a terrifically expensive failure, chewing up tens of thousands of men to gain about 3 villages. Where is the oft-promised breakthrough? The severing of Russia’s land bridge to Crimea?
It’s not happening, is it? We are now in mid September and it all grinds on, pointlessly
Russia cannot win this war (without Trump) but nor, I fear, can Ukraine
They have a breakthrough in southern Ukraine. It’s painstaking work and doesn’t make for good TV so you judge it a failure
They don’t have a breakthrough. From today’s Guardian
“Earlier Maliar had issued a lengthy update on Telegram, claiming that Ukrainian forces have repelled Russian attacks in a number of areas, including in the Kupyansk, Bakhmut, and Marinka directions. Maliar also gave new figures for the amount of territory recaptured by Ukraine. She said 2 sq km had been captured around Bakhmut, and in the past week, and that 51 sq km had been recaptured there since the start of the counteroffensive“
51sq km. That’s about two London boroughs. Maybe 6km by 9km. At a cost of 10,000 men? 20,000? And it’s taken months
Face it, this is not working
They’ve also just sacked 6 defence ministers, which says something in itself
FWIW Ukraine had a spectacular week last week, including the destruction of a submarine and a landing ship and the rout of an entire Russian Brigade, as well as advances in at least four different areas in the South, East and on the Dnipro.
Putinism is in a terrible state and Russia highly unstable, but sure its Ukraine that is on the back foot...
Leon has reverted to his usual Chicken Licken Ninnyism...
Yes, of course, for merely pointing out the facts on the ground, I am some kind of coward and a ‘fucking appeaser’ and pro Putin and wishing for Ukrainian defeat, etc
We had this debate about a month ago when I queried Ukrainian progress and I was roundly accused then of defeatism and appeasement and the like, and you all said, just wait, the breakthrough is nearly here, soon the brave Ukrainians will smash through the first line of defence and race to the Azov and cut off Crimea
And it hasn’t happened
If all you ever read is English language Twitter reportage you'd think Ukraine is pissing it in and will be at the Astoria hotel in SPb for shampanskoye and medals on New Year's Eve.
If all you ever read is Russian language Telegram output you'd think the Ukrainians are fucked and are on the verge of total collapse.
The Centrist Dad's Army on here do the former. In reality, nobody really knows what the fuck is happening. Least of all those who are getting their balls, face and knock-off Adidas trainers blown off in the mud.
Territory illegally occupied by Israel: 7,200 sq. km. Territory illegally occupied by Russia: 157,500 sq. km.
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
There are some small changes that shouldn’t be too controversial and the EU would likely agree with . A large scale re-negotiation I agree is out of the question.
Ergo, one way or another, Starmer is lying. Not for the first time
He said he’d like to re-write the deal . We don’t know what if any changes are possible until we get to that point . Not sure it’s fair to accuse him of lying . The EU has a lot more goodwill towards Labour than the handmaidens of Brexit.
If you rule out SM/CU then the golden goose was really Horizon and Sunak has already plucked it. It may be possible to have more trusted trader schemes etc but that will make very little difference to 99.9% of the population.
Starmer made remarks about ‘getting a better EU deal for my kids’ and to me that means, probably, restoring some kind of Free Movement
I do wonder if he will go for it
Some sort of freedom of movement might be possible. The reality is that this exists already. I was doing a trial recently where one of the charges was attempting to pervert the course of justice. The accused was an Algerian but had been living here pretending to have been French (using false documents) and pretending to be covered by the transitional provisions applicable at the time of Brexit. Millions of people were granted such rights with very little inquiry and it does not take a lot of imagination to conclude that a fair number of these will have been for those wanting to sell a package of documentation to the likes of that Algerian.
I largely agree. I never had issues with Free Movement and it is now clear - as has been said on here - that neither party has any intention (or ability?) to really tackle mass immigration
So it is arguable we might as well get the benefits of the Single Market - perhaps
Pretty soon all the parties will be doing things to tackle mass immigration.
Not while the parties are convinced we need immigration to fill low-skilled jobs workshy Brits refuse, to do highly-skilled jobs like doctors and nurses that we don't train enough of and to counter the demographic timebomb. Something something Japan.
Truly back to 2015
Perhaps. But I await someone to propose an alternative: 1 Too many Brits are workshy. We have an attitude problem as a workforce compared to so many from eastern Europe and elsewhere. Despite a positive push of people out of the UK after Brexit, Brits haven't filled these jobs because they don't want them and never did. 2 Where we need skilled workers, we don't want to invest in training them. Things like the nursing bursary being cut are wholly counter-productive. "we can't afford it" ignores the costs of not having it, as usual. 3 I get repeatedly assured by PB Brexiteers that the likes of fruit farms should automate. Except that they can't because they don't have the money and the industry is financially a basket case. We have scrapped the hated CAP and replaced it with nothing. Farmers hated being told what to do for the money, voted to leave, and now have all the freedom but no actual money
The CAP was replaced pretty much like for like. As with a host of other things.
Three and a half years of people refusing to accept the result, followed by two years of pandemic probably weren’t ideal conditions
As she has stood down as an MP at the next election too probably so she can go job hunting
She’s only 30, and has been an MP for five minutes. How on earth is she standing down?
Because she's smart enough to read the writing on the wall and knows she has zero chance to remain as an MP after the next election so needs to make alternative plans to be able to pay her bills in 2025 onwards?
Only 30, she probably can't afford to be unemployed for too long.
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
As I said earlier joining the single market is the only way to change the EU, and anything else is cosmetic
And at the moment raising that issue is certain to rouse latent Brexit support from its slumber. Single Market is Freedom Of Movement. Single Market is putting all of those terrible Euroregulations back into British Law.
Personally, I'd be fine with that. I'd even be fine if we fully aligned indefinitely and waited for a monthly email from Brussels telling us what new stuff they've come up with for us. (The freedoms at a personal level seem worth it to me.) But it would send the right, and the press, dolally, and Starmer isn't going to touch the button marked "Pressing This Button Is Incredibly Risky". There are enough people who hate all that to give Rishi a liferaft he doesn't deserve.
It's going to be like I said in 2020.
The next thing we try, 2025ish, will be a TCA that realistically co-operates on trade. Vet agreements, standards marking, that sort of thing. It will help a bit, but no- not much. That looks like Starmer's plan. But he won't be PM forever.
Beyond that, it gets speculative, anything might happen, but I haven't seen anything to change my rough schedule.
Single Market will be 2030ish. We can probably chuck in some Union of Customs as well. The Brit deals aren't coming out with anything special, and we can leave CPTPP with six months notice.
And then, who knows? Maybe the UK will be fine tagging along with whatever Brussels says. A lot of it is boring technical stuff, and there is the possibility of being consulted. A bit. I don't think the UK political classes are going to be happy with that, which is why Rejoin might happen, but only under a new generation of politicians.
All a bit rubbish, because the UK is gently bleeding under the current arrangements. But I wouldn't have started here.
But we’re not gently bleeding. We are growing faster than Germany and about the same speed as France
Britain is not in a great position but neither is much of Europe, or, indeed, the world
98% of our problems have nothing to do with Brexit and many of them are down to chronic, self inflicted stupidity and a dysfunctional government and civil service - eg HS2
Oh for goodness sake even if we were roaring away successful and Europe was going off a cliff edge that doesn't mean Brexit is successful. You have to compare what you have gained to what you have lost, not compare us with another country and go 'look they are having problems too'. About the only thing you did get right there is it isn't all about Brexit. There are lots of other stuff that has an impact making your observation utterly pointless. You can only look at the gains and losses.
So the question is has the improvements in exporting and importing to the rest of the world greater than the loss in importing and exporting to Europe. To my mind the answer to that question is very very clear.
If not do the freedoms/restrictions of being outside of Europe in other areas outweigh the freedoms/restrictions of being in Europe. And the answer to that question in my mind is even clearer.
How many times can we repeat this argument? For me, Brexit is Brexit
Regaining sovereignty and proper democracy is really all that I cared about. That’s been done. So for me it is a success. I understand that you differ
What about Britain out of the EU makes it a "proper democracy"? A party that fails to win a majority of votes can still receive a majority of seats. An individual seat is still won by FPTP. Our Commons is still whipped and cajoled by the leadership, and very few votes fall outside of that. A political consensus that drips from the media and tufton street still holds sway. Indeed, the two major parties of government have very little policy differences between them - one of them offering a shit future administered poorly and the other one offering a shit future administered efficiently.
The biggest single win from Brexit has been preventing politicans doing things which they may or may not want to do and saying "EU rules, nothing we can do other than comply".
I'd vote for Brexit again tomorrow, regardless of economic cost, in order to prevent them getting that nasty little figleaf back (most of the time it was things they wanted to do, but the public wouldn't wear). A democracy where the top elected politicans can plausibly claim they are being made to do things the voters don't want by a higher power is not a proper democracy by any standard.
La Truss has been giving her speech today. She was the top elected politician, tried to do something, and was forced instead to do things that voters don't want by a higher power.
So Britain needs to leave the international money markets. Take Back Control of our lives by going back to simpler times where we simply took the things we wanted and sent a gunboat to shoot anyone who thought that was a bad idea.
The 'international money markets' have decided that Sunak's way is twice as shit as Truss's way.
In what way? I don't want to defend Sunak/Hunt too vehemently, but the pound is a fair bit stronger than it was with Truss/Kwarteng at the helm, and the Bank of England hasn't needed to come in with a multi-billion pound package to stave off an imminent collapse in pension funds. It's not a high bar, but they do appear to have cleared it.
The Bank of England didn't come in with a multi-billion package for Truss either. They effectively rolled back a part of their catastrophically dumb Quantitative Tightening they announced at about the same time as the mini-Budget either.
Net over that period the BoE were tightening things, not loosening them, as the media portrayed.
Truss's problems were far more media management than economic. She was stupid to bundle her ambitions in at the same time as the energy bailout, and the same time as the Bank were announcing tightening, as the markets would have reacted either way - but by headlining with what was actually some pretty minor changes to taxes which could and should have waited for a proper Budget she took ownership of the whole disaster.
Truss’s biggest problem was Sunak, and his friends in the PCP and media, who refused to accept the result of the election, and were gunning for her 24 hours after the Queen was buried.
More seriously, the Russians must know by now that they’re stuffed. Black Sea fleet on it’s way to being completely destroyed as a viable force, the entirety of their Soviet arsenal chewed up into pieces in the fields of Ukraine, along with the flower of both their infantry & cavalry. The only thing keeping them going is a stubborn refusal to admit the inevitable. Still, something might turn up for them I guess - a Trump 2024 victory perhaps? It seems hope is all they have left & hope is not a wining strategy.
On the other hand the great Ukrainian counter-offensive has been a terrifically expensive failure, chewing up tens of thousands of men to gain about 3 villages. Where is the oft-promised breakthrough? The severing of Russia’s land bridge to Crimea?
It’s not happening, is it? We are now in mid September and it all grinds on, pointlessly
Russia cannot win this war (without Trump) but nor, I fear, can Ukraine
They have a breakthrough in southern Ukraine. It’s painstaking work and doesn’t make for good TV so you judge it a failure
They don’t have a breakthrough. From today’s Guardian
“Earlier Maliar had issued a lengthy update on Telegram, claiming that Ukrainian forces have repelled Russian attacks in a number of areas, including in the Kupyansk, Bakhmut, and Marinka directions. Maliar also gave new figures for the amount of territory recaptured by Ukraine. She said 2 sq km had been captured around Bakhmut, and in the past week, and that 51 sq km had been recaptured there since the start of the counteroffensive“
51sq km. That’s about two London boroughs. Maybe 6km by 9km. At a cost of 10,000 men? 20,000? And it’s taken months
Face it, this is not working
They’ve also just sacked 6 defence ministers, which says something in itself
I'm not sure what you expect?
There's no magic way to win a war. You have to destroy the enemy army. Before you have done this they will be able to resist and hold ground.
I think there's decent evidence that Ukraine are inflicting greater losses then they are suffering, and so, if they are inflicting losses on Russia more quickly then Russia can replace those losses, they will eventually reach a point where Russia is unable to defend the current front line. But this will necessarily take time and it will look like not much progress is made while it plays out.
Meanwhile, for example, we can see that Ukraine is able to attack valuable Russians assets almost at will, whole Russia is unable to enforce it's blockade of Ukrainian ports.
Probably the wrong analogy, but in the first world war the British fought an epic battle on the Somme and then a year later another at Passchendaele, both often regarded as at best pyrrhic victories. Yet both were instrumental in the weakening and ultimate defeat of the Imperial German Army. The Somme was described as 'the muddy grave of the German Army' and resulted in the withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line in 1917. After Passchendaele a German general staff publication had "Germany had been brought near to certain destruction (sicheren Untergang) by the Flanders battle of 1917".
Yet after both battles, I suspect @Leon would have been calling them failures.
I cannot see the future, but I think the danger of Russia 'winning' in Ukraine is gone, and its now all about whether Russia can be ejected fully (and at what cost) or if Putin finally gets replaced. Regimes can fall very fast at the end.
It's not a terrible analogy, because it highlights that the enemy army has to be destroyed in order to defeat it, but there are key differences.
The most important is that Ukraine has an advantage with key weapons - drones, HIMARS, Storm Shadow, etc - which means they can destroy the Russian army with considerably less losses than that suffered by the British and French in WWI.
But another key difference is that the combined populations of France and Britain, and the British and French empires, vastly exceeded the population of the kaiser’s Germany. In brutal terms, the western powers could afford to lose more men than Berlin, in the end. And then the Americans joined in, tilting it even further
That is very much not the case here. The Russian population is 3x that of Ukraine
In a brutal war of attrition, this basic maths matters. I also dispute that Ukraine is losing fewer men now, than Russia. Ukraine is on the offensive, that is always more expensive in lives than defence
Ukraine haven't made many direct assaults of the kind that we saw in early June, where we saw damaged Leopard tanks. If they had we would be seeing the photos of it from the Russians. They've deliberately been fighting in a way to minimise casualties. It also sounds like the western kit might not be magic in terms of forcing a breakthrough, but does a great job on saving lives. The Ukrainian tank crews are walking away from most of Western armoured vehicles when they're damaged or destroyed.
So I think it's quite plausible that Ukrainian casualties are lower than Russian.
Also, number of soldiers dead is not likely to be the determinant of Russia reaching a breaking point. Running out of military equipment will come first. This is why Ukraine's success in the artillery war is so important.
Soviet doctrine for their military vehicles was to make as many of them as possible given their large population. As a result their prioritised production over things such as crew protection. This has carried on over into current Russian thinking. The crew of a Russian tank or armoured vehicle is very unlikely to survive. Whereas in the West we realised the need to protect valuable crews an d made smaller numbers of vehicles that prioritised crew safety. As I understand it most crews in knocked out western vehicles have survived.
Ukraine learnt very quickly from one early offensive in June that it couldn't just charge a load of Western tanks/IFVs at Russian defences. They have since been waging a war of attrition against Russia. It is slow but it does seem to be working. Russia has less and less gear even if it still does have lots of manpower. The gear that it has is of car worse quality than what it could use at the start of the war.
Even in manpower it is becoming a struggle for Russia. They are now manning their defence with elite offensive units. Why would they do this unless they had no other choice? Those units will not be used again for offensive operations.
Ukraine is also becoming more and more adapt with its long range weapons. The Black Sea is almost a no-go area now for Russian warships as has been seen over the last week.
It is a long process but I do not see many positives for Russia. It is bloody for Ukraine but things are slowly moving in their direction.
One positive for Russia is that they haven't lost yet, and it's possible that Europe and the US will talk themselves into giving up.
Apparently the favourite in the Slovak election has pledged to stop providing any support for Ukraine. People might scoff at Slovakia's size, but Ukraine has an important joint-venture with them that is delivering new self-propelled artillery, and they've been a firm supporter of Ukraine to this point.
You can't talk yourself into winning a war you are losing, but you can talk yourself into losing a war that you are winning - and I think that's what Leon (and others) are doing.
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
As I said earlier joining the single market is the only way to change the EU, and anything else is cosmetic
And at the moment raising that issue is certain to rouse latent Brexit support from its slumber. Single Market is Freedom Of Movement. Single Market is putting all of those terrible Euroregulations back into British Law.
Personally, I'd be fine with that. I'd even be fine if we fully aligned indefinitely and waited for a monthly email from Brussels telling us what new stuff they've come up with for us. (The freedoms at a personal level seem worth it to me.) But it would send the right, and the press, dolally, and Starmer isn't going to touch the button marked "Pressing This Button Is Incredibly Risky". There are enough people who hate all that to give Rishi a liferaft he doesn't deserve.
It's going to be like I said in 2020.
The next thing we try, 2025ish, will be a TCA that realistically co-operates on trade. Vet agreements, standards marking, that sort of thing. It will help a bit, but no- not much. That looks like Starmer's plan. But he won't be PM forever.
Beyond that, it gets speculative, anything might happen, but I haven't seen anything to change my rough schedule.
Single Market will be 2030ish. We can probably chuck in some Union of Customs as well. The Brit deals aren't coming out with anything special, and we can leave CPTPP with six months notice.
And then, who knows? Maybe the UK will be fine tagging along with whatever Brussels says. A lot of it is boring technical stuff, and there is the possibility of being consulted. A bit. I don't think the UK political classes are going to be happy with that, which is why Rejoin might happen, but only under a new generation of politicians.
All a bit rubbish, because the UK is gently bleeding under the current arrangements. But I wouldn't have started here.
But we’re not gently bleeding. We are growing faster than Germany and about the same speed as France
Britain is not in a great position but neither is much of Europe, or, indeed, the world
98% of our problems have nothing to do with Brexit and many of them are down to chronic, self inflicted stupidity and a dysfunctional government and civil service - eg HS2
Oh for goodness sake even if we were roaring away successful and Europe was going off a cliff edge that doesn't mean Brexit is successful. You have to compare what you have gained to what you have lost, not compare us with another country and go 'look they are having problems too'. About the only thing you did get right there is it isn't all about Brexit. There are lots of other stuff that has an impact making your observation utterly pointless. You can only look at the gains and losses.
So the question is has the improvements in exporting and importing to the rest of the world greater than the loss in importing and exporting to Europe. To my mind the answer to that question is very very clear.
If not do the freedoms/restrictions of being outside of Europe in other areas outweigh the freedoms/restrictions of being in Europe. And the answer to that question in my mind is even clearer.
How many times can we repeat this argument? For me, Brexit is Brexit
Regaining sovereignty and proper democracy is really all that I cared about. That’s been done. So for me it is a success. I understand that you differ
What about Britain out of the EU makes it a "proper democracy"? A party that fails to win a majority of votes can still receive a majority of seats. An individual seat is still won by FPTP. Our Commons is still whipped and cajoled by the leadership, and very few votes fall outside of that. A political consensus that drips from the media and tufton street still holds sway. Indeed, the two major parties of government have very little policy differences between them - one of them offering a shit future administered poorly and the other one offering a shit future administered efficiently.
The biggest single win from Brexit has been preventing politicans doing things which they may or may not want to do and saying "EU rules, nothing we can do other than comply".
I'd vote for Brexit again tomorrow, regardless of economic cost, in order to prevent them getting that nasty little figleaf back (most of the time it was things they wanted to do, but the public wouldn't wear). A democracy where the top elected politicans can plausibly claim they are being made to do things the voters don't want by a higher power is not a proper democracy by any standard.
La Truss has been giving her speech today. She was the top elected politician, tried to do something, and was forced instead to do things that voters don't want by a higher power.
So Britain needs to leave the international money markets. Take Back Control of our lives by going back to simpler times where we simply took the things we wanted and sent a gunboat to shoot anyone who thought that was a bad idea.
The 'international money markets' have decided that Sunak's way is twice as shit as Truss's way.
In what way? I don't want to defend Sunak/Hunt too vehemently, but the pound is a fair bit stronger than it was with Truss/Kwarteng at the helm, and the Bank of England hasn't needed to come in with a multi-billion pound package to stave off an imminent collapse in pension funds. It's not a high bar, but they do appear to have cleared it.
The Bank of England didn't come in with a multi-billion package for Truss either. They effectively rolled back a part of their catastrophically dumb Quantitative Tightening they announced at about the same time as the mini-Budget either.
Net over that period the BoE were tightening things, not loosening them, as the media portrayed.
Truss's problems were far more media management than economic. She was stupid to bundle her ambitions in at the same time as the energy bailout, and the same time as the Bank were announcing tightening, as the markets would have reacted either way - but by headlining with what was actually some pretty minor changes to taxes which could and should have waited for a proper Budget she took ownership of the whole disaster.
Truss’s biggest problem was Sunak, and his friends in the PCP and media, who refused to accept the result of the election, and were gunning for her 24 hours after the Queen was buried.
No, Truss's biggest problem was her own naivety.
That your opponents don't accept defeat is politics. She shouldn't have given them the opportunity she did.
Had the announcement in the mini budget been purely the the energy bailout etc that were to be welcomed by the public, and the Bank's Tightening been done separately from any political policies, then the market turmoil would be simply part of the global situation.
Instead she acted like a human shield, ran headfirst into landmines, and got picked apart by Sunak's snipers. She stupidly gave them the chance to get victory from defeat.
More seriously, the Russians must know by now that they’re stuffed. Black Sea fleet on it’s way to being completely destroyed as a viable force, the entirety of their Soviet arsenal chewed up into pieces in the fields of Ukraine, along with the flower of both their infantry & cavalry. The only thing keeping them going is a stubborn refusal to admit the inevitable. Still, something might turn up for them I guess - a Trump 2024 victory perhaps? It seems hope is all they have left & hope is not a wining strategy.
On the other hand the great Ukrainian counter-offensive has been a terrifically expensive failure, chewing up tens of thousands of men to gain about 3 villages. Where is the oft-promised breakthrough? The severing of Russia’s land bridge to Crimea?
It’s not happening, is it? We are now in mid September and it all grinds on, pointlessly
Russia cannot win this war (without Trump) but nor, I fear, can Ukraine
They have a breakthrough in southern Ukraine. It’s painstaking work and doesn’t make for good TV so you judge it a failure
They don’t have a breakthrough. From today’s Guardian
“Earlier Maliar had issued a lengthy update on Telegram, claiming that Ukrainian forces have repelled Russian attacks in a number of areas, including in the Kupyansk, Bakhmut, and Marinka directions. Maliar also gave new figures for the amount of territory recaptured by Ukraine. She said 2 sq km had been captured around Bakhmut, and in the past week, and that 51 sq km had been recaptured there since the start of the counteroffensive“
51sq km. That’s about two London boroughs. Maybe 6km by 9km. At a cost of 10,000 men? 20,000? And it’s taken months
Face it, this is not working
They’ve also just sacked 6 defence ministers, which says something in itself
I'm not sure what you expect?
There's no magic way to win a war. You have to destroy the enemy army. Before you have done this they will be able to resist and hold ground.
I think there's decent evidence that Ukraine are inflicting greater losses then they are suffering, and so, if they are inflicting losses on Russia more quickly then Russia can replace those losses, they will eventually reach a point where Russia is unable to defend the current front line. But this will necessarily take time and it will look like not much progress is made while it plays out.
Meanwhile, for example, we can see that Ukraine is able to attack valuable Russians assets almost at will, whole Russia is unable to enforce it's blockade of Ukrainian ports.
Probably the wrong analogy, but in the first world war the British fought an epic battle on the Somme and then a year later another at Passchendaele, both often regarded as at best pyrrhic victories. Yet both were instrumental in the weakening and ultimate defeat of the Imperial German Army. The Somme was described as 'the muddy grave of the German Army' and resulted in the withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line in 1917. After Passchendaele a German general staff publication had "Germany had been brought near to certain destruction (sicheren Untergang) by the Flanders battle of 1917".
Yet after both battles, I suspect @Leon would have been calling them failures.
I cannot see the future, but I think the danger of Russia 'winning' in Ukraine is gone, and its now all about whether Russia can be ejected fully (and at what cost) or if Putin finally gets replaced. Regimes can fall very fast at the end.
It's not a terrible analogy, because it highlights that the enemy army has to be destroyed in order to defeat it, but there are key differences.
The most important is that Ukraine has an advantage with key weapons - drones, HIMARS, Storm Shadow, etc - which means they can destroy the Russian army with considerably less losses than that suffered by the British and French in WWI.
But another key difference is that the combined populations of France and Britain, and the British and French empires, vastly exceeded the population of the kaiser’s Germany. In brutal terms, the western powers could afford to lose more men than Berlin, in the end. And then the Americans joined in, tilting it even further
That is very much not the case here. The Russian population is 3x that of Ukraine
In a brutal war of attrition, this basic maths matters. I also dispute that Ukraine is losing fewer men now, than Russia. Ukraine is on the offensive, that is always more expensive in lives than defence
Ukraine haven't made many direct assaults of the kind that we saw in early June, where we saw damaged Leopard tanks. If they had we would be seeing the photos of it from the Russians. They've deliberately been fighting in a way to minimise casualties. It also sounds like the western kit might not be magic in terms of forcing a breakthrough, but does a great job on saving lives. The Ukrainian tank crews are walking away from most of Western armoured vehicles when they're damaged or destroyed.
So I think it's quite plausible that Ukrainian casualties are lower than Russian.
Also, number of soldiers dead is not likely to be the determinant of Russia reaching a breaking point. Running out of military equipment will come first. This is why Ukraine's success in the artillery war is so important.
Soviet doctrine for their military vehicles was to make as many of them as possible given their large population. As a result their prioritised production over things such as crew protection. This has carried on over into current Russian thinking. The crew of a Russian tank or armoured vehicle is very unlikely to survive. Whereas in the West we realised the need to protect valuable crews an d made smaller numbers of vehicles that prioritised crew safety. As I understand it most crews in knocked out western vehicles have survived.
Ukraine learnt very quickly from one early offensive in June that it couldn't just charge a load of Western tanks/IFVs at Russian defences. They have since been waging a war of attrition against Russia. It is slow but it does seem to be working. Russia has less and less gear even if it still does have lots of manpower. The gear that it has is of car worse quality than what it could use at the start of the war.
Even in manpower it is becoming a struggle for Russia. They are now manning their defence with elite offensive units. Why would they do this unless they had no other choice? Those units will not be used again for offensive operations.
Ukraine is also becoming more and more adapt with its long range weapons. The Black Sea is almost a no-go area now for Russian warships as has been seen over the last week.
It is a long process but I do not see many positives for Russia. It is bloody for Ukraine but things are slowly moving in their direction.
One positive for Russia is that they haven't lost yet, and it's possible that Europe and the US will talk themselves into giving up.
Apparently the favourite in the Slovak election has pledged to stop providing any support for Ukraine. People might scoff at Slovakia's size, but Ukraine has an important joint-venture with them that is delivering new self-propelled artillery, and they've been a firm supporter of Ukraine to this point.
You can't talk yourself into winning a war you are losing, but you can talk yourself into losing a war that you are winning - and I think that's what Leon is doing.
Slovakia willingly took part in the invasion of Poland in 1939.
As she has stood down as an MP at the next election too probably so she can go job hunting
She’s only 30, and has been an MP for five minutes. How on earth is she standing down?
Doesn't quite match the record of Louise Mensch though, the chick lit novellist was put on Cameron's A List, won Corby in 2010 at 38, got bored after just 2 years and resigned her seat to move to New York city with her music manager husband. Labour then won the seat in the subsequent by election
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
There are some small changes that shouldn’t be too controversial and the EU would likely agree with . A large scale re-negotiation I agree is out of the question.
Ergo, one way or another, Starmer is lying. Not for the first time
He said he’d like to re-write the deal . We don’t know what if any changes are possible until we get to that point . Not sure it’s fair to accuse him of lying . The EU has a lot more goodwill towards Labour than the handmaidens of Brexit.
If you rule out SM/CU then the golden goose was really Horizon and Sunak has already plucked it. It may be possible to have more trusted trader schemes etc but that will make very little difference to 99.9% of the population.
Starmer made remarks about ‘getting a better EU deal for my kids’ and to me that means, probably, restoring some kind of Free Movement
I do wonder if he will go for it
Some sort of freedom of movement might be possible. The reality is that this exists already. I was doing a trial recently where one of the charges was attempting to pervert the course of justice. The accused was an Algerian but had been living here pretending to have been French (using false documents) and pretending to be covered by the transitional provisions applicable at the time of Brexit. Millions of people were granted such rights with very little inquiry and it does not take a lot of imagination to conclude that a fair number of these will have been for those wanting to sell a package of documentation to the likes of that Algerian.
I largely agree. I never had issues with Free Movement and it is now clear - as has been said on here - that neither party has any intention (or ability?) to really tackle mass immigration
So it is arguable we might as well get the benefits of the Single Market - perhaps
Pretty soon all the parties will be doing things to tackle mass immigration.
Not while the parties are convinced we need immigration to fill low-skilled jobs workshy Brits refuse, to do highly-skilled jobs like doctors and nurses that we don't train enough of and to counter the demographic timebomb. Something something Japan.
Truly back to 2015
Perhaps. But I await someone to propose an alternative: 1 Too many Brits are workshy. We have an attitude problem as a workforce compared to so many from eastern Europe and elsewhere. Despite a positive push of people out of the UK after Brexit, Brits haven't filled these jobs because they don't want them and never did. 2 Where we need skilled workers, we don't want to invest in training them. Things like the nursing bursary being cut are wholly counter-productive. "we can't afford it" ignores the costs of not having it, as usual. 3 I get repeatedly assured by PB Brexiteers that the likes of fruit farms should automate. Except that they can't because they don't have the money and the industry is financially a basket case. We have scrapped the hated CAP and replaced it with nothing. Farmers hated being told what to do for the money, voted to leave, and now have all the freedom but no actual money
The CAP was replaced pretty much like for like. As with a host of other things.
Three and a half years of people refusing to accept the result, followed by two years of pandemic probably weren’t ideal conditions
COVID seems to have “reset” employment is a number of countries. The supply of people eager to do shitty jobs for low pay is rather lower than it used to be.
Which is why we need to get the small boat people into the cotton fields as quickly as possible.
More seriously, the Russians must know by now that they’re stuffed. Black Sea fleet on it’s way to being completely destroyed as a viable force, the entirety of their Soviet arsenal chewed up into pieces in the fields of Ukraine, along with the flower of both their infantry & cavalry. The only thing keeping them going is a stubborn refusal to admit the inevitable. Still, something might turn up for them I guess - a Trump 2024 victory perhaps? It seems hope is all they have left & hope is not a wining strategy.
On the other hand the great Ukrainian counter-offensive has been a terrifically expensive failure, chewing up tens of thousands of men to gain about 3 villages. Where is the oft-promised breakthrough? The severing of Russia’s land bridge to Crimea?
It’s not happening, is it? We are now in mid September and it all grinds on, pointlessly
Russia cannot win this war (without Trump) but nor, I fear, can Ukraine
They have a breakthrough in southern Ukraine. It’s painstaking work and doesn’t make for good TV so you judge it a failure
They don’t have a breakthrough. From today’s Guardian
“Earlier Maliar had issued a lengthy update on Telegram, claiming that Ukrainian forces have repelled Russian attacks in a number of areas, including in the Kupyansk, Bakhmut, and Marinka directions. Maliar also gave new figures for the amount of territory recaptured by Ukraine. She said 2 sq km had been captured around Bakhmut, and in the past week, and that 51 sq km had been recaptured there since the start of the counteroffensive“
51sq km. That’s about two London boroughs. Maybe 6km by 9km. At a cost of 10,000 men? 20,000? And it’s taken months
Face it, this is not working
They’ve also just sacked 6 defence ministers, which says something in itself
FWIW Ukraine had a spectacular week last week, including the destruction of a submarine and a landing ship and the rout of an entire Russian Brigade, as well as advances in at least four different areas in the South, East and on the Dnipro.
Putinism is in a terrible state and Russia highly unstable, but sure its Ukraine that is on the back foot...
Leon has reverted to his usual Chicken Licken Ninnyism...
Yes, of course, for merely pointing out the facts on the ground, I am some kind of coward and a ‘fucking appeaser’ and pro Putin and wishing for Ukrainian defeat, etc
We had this debate about a month ago when I queried Ukrainian progress and I was roundly accused then of defeatism and appeasement and the like, and you all said, just wait, the breakthrough is nearly here, soon the brave Ukrainians will smash through the first line of defence and race to the Azov and cut off Crimea
And it hasn’t happened
If all you ever read is English language Twitter reportage you'd think Ukraine is pissing it in and will be at the Astoria hotel in SPb for shampanskoye and medals on New Year's Eve.
If all you ever read is Russian language Telegram output you'd think the Ukrainians are fucked and are on the verge of total collapse.
The Centrist Dad's Army on here do the former. In reality, nobody really knows what the fuck is happening. Least of all those who are getting their balls, face and knock-off Adidas trainers blown off in the mud.
As she has stood down as an MP at the next election too probably so she can go job hunting
She’s only 30, and has been an MP for five minutes. How on earth is she standing down?
Doesn't quite match the record of Louise Mensch though, the chick lit novellist was put on Cameron's A List, won Corby in 2010, got bored after just 2 years and resigned her seat to move to New York city with her music manager husband. Labour then won the seat in the subsequent by election
Don’t f****** menschon that b*****.
I spent a couple of weeks knocking doors for her in Corby in 2010, only to see her **** off to America two years later.
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
As I said earlier joining the single market is the only way to change the EU, and anything else is cosmetic
And at the moment raising that issue is certain to rouse latent Brexit support from its slumber. Single Market is Freedom Of Movement. Single Market is putting all of those terrible Euroregulations back into British Law.
Personally, I'd be fine with that. I'd even be fine if we fully aligned indefinitely and waited for a monthly email from Brussels telling us what new stuff they've come up with for us. (The freedoms at a personal level seem worth it to me.) But it would send the right, and the press, dolally, and Starmer isn't going to touch the button marked "Pressing This Button Is Incredibly Risky". There are enough people who hate all that to give Rishi a liferaft he doesn't deserve.
It's going to be like I said in 2020.
The next thing we try, 2025ish, will be a TCA that realistically co-operates on trade. Vet agreements, standards marking, that sort of thing. It will help a bit, but no- not much. That looks like Starmer's plan. But he won't be PM forever.
Beyond that, it gets speculative, anything might happen, but I haven't seen anything to change my rough schedule.
Single Market will be 2030ish. We can probably chuck in some Union of Customs as well. The Brit deals aren't coming out with anything special, and we can leave CPTPP with six months notice.
And then, who knows? Maybe the UK will be fine tagging along with whatever Brussels says. A lot of it is boring technical stuff, and there is the possibility of being consulted. A bit. I don't think the UK political classes are going to be happy with that, which is why Rejoin might happen, but only under a new generation of politicians.
All a bit rubbish, because the UK is gently bleeding under the current arrangements. But I wouldn't have started here.
But we’re not gently bleeding. We are growing faster than Germany and about the same speed as France
Britain is not in a great position but neither is much of Europe, or, indeed, the world
98% of our problems have nothing to do with Brexit and many of them are down to chronic, self inflicted stupidity and a dysfunctional government and civil service - eg HS2
Oh for goodness sake even if we were roaring away successful and Europe was going off a cliff edge that doesn't mean Brexit is successful. You have to compare what you have gained to what you have lost, not compare us with another country and go 'look they are having problems too'. About the only thing you did get right there is it isn't all about Brexit. There are lots of other stuff that has an impact making your observation utterly pointless. You can only look at the gains and losses.
So the question is has the improvements in exporting and importing to the rest of the world greater than the loss in importing and exporting to Europe. To my mind the answer to that question is very very clear.
If not do the freedoms/restrictions of being outside of Europe in other areas outweigh the freedoms/restrictions of being in Europe. And the answer to that question in my mind is even clearer.
How many times can we repeat this argument? For me, Brexit is Brexit
Regaining sovereignty and proper democracy is really all that I cared about. That’s been done. So for me it is a success. I understand that you differ
What about Britain out of the EU makes it a "proper democracy"? A party that fails to win a majority of votes can still receive a majority of seats. An individual seat is still won by FPTP. Our Commons is still whipped and cajoled by the leadership, and very few votes fall outside of that. A political consensus that drips from the media and tufton street still holds sway. Indeed, the two major parties of government have very little policy differences between them - one of them offering a shit future administered poorly and the other one offering a shit future administered efficiently.
The biggest single win from Brexit has been preventing politicans doing things which they may or may not want to do and saying "EU rules, nothing we can do other than comply".
I'd vote for Brexit again tomorrow, regardless of economic cost, in order to prevent them getting that nasty little figleaf back (most of the time it was things they wanted to do, but the public wouldn't wear). A democracy where the top elected politicans can plausibly claim they are being made to do things the voters don't want by a higher power is not a proper democracy by any standard.
La Truss has been giving her speech today. She was the top elected politician, tried to do something, and was forced instead to do things that voters don't want by a higher power.
So Britain needs to leave the international money markets. Take Back Control of our lives by going back to simpler times where we simply took the things we wanted and sent a gunboat to shoot anyone who thought that was a bad idea.
The 'international money markets' have decided that Sunak's way is twice as shit as Truss's way.
In what way? I don't want to defend Sunak/Hunt too vehemently, but the pound is a fair bit stronger than it was with Truss/Kwarteng at the helm, and the Bank of England hasn't needed to come in with a multi-billion pound package to stave off an imminent collapse in pension funds. It's not a high bar, but they do appear to have cleared it.
The Bank of England didn't come in with a multi-billion package for Truss either. They effectively rolled back a part of their catastrophically dumb Quantitative Tightening they announced at about the same time as the mini-Budget either.
Net over that period the BoE were tightening things, not loosening them, as the media portrayed.
Truss's problems were far more media management than economic. She was stupid to bundle her ambitions in at the same time as the energy bailout, and the same time as the Bank were announcing tightening, as the markets would have reacted either way - but by headlining with what was actually some pretty minor changes to taxes which could and should have waited for a proper Budget she took ownership of the whole disaster.
Truss’s biggest problem was Sunak, and his friends in the PCP and media, who refused to accept the result of the election, and were gunning for her 24 hours after the Queen was buried.
Was Rishi really a thing after Liz's victory? My recollection was that the British Right was proclaiming her, after decades of false dawns, as the final and authentic embodiment of all their hopes and dreams, and with 'the Anti-Growth Coalition' she had come up with a slogan that would bury Sir Keir an Labour alive. Rishi had completely sunk into nothingness.
People who've moved aren't registered yet is about as shocking as it raining in England.
People who haven't moved are registered is about as shocking as the sun rising in the East.
People need to register that they've moved address, many don't bother immediately, but before every election there's a surge of people registering in time to vote.
I myself moved late last year but only registered to vote days before the deadline for the local elections this year, because that prompted it. Never lost my vote though, despite for a few months being "registered at the wrong address".
As she has stood down as an MP at the next election too probably so she can go job hunting
She’s only 30, and has been an MP for five minutes. How on earth is she standing down?
Doesn't quite match the record of Louise Mensch though, the chick lit novellist was put on Cameron's A List, won Corby in 2010 at 38, got bored after just 2 years and resigned her seat to move to New York city with her music manager husband. Labour then won the seat in the subsequent by election
Ah yes, Louise Mensch, who was publicly humiliated by an erstwhile PBer over her claim that 'Zionist' was inherently anti-semitic.
Was Rishi really a thing after Liz's victory? My recollection was that the British Right was proclaiming her, after decades of false dawns, as the final and authentic embodiment of all their hopes and dreams, and with 'the Anti-Growth Coalition' she had come up with a slogan that would bury Sir Keir an Labour alive. Rishi had completely sunk into nothingness.
He was completely invisible after Truss gaped his hole in the leadership contest. He only re-emerged from inside a Kinder Egg after The Men in Grey Tenas did for her.
Cummings called it very early on, describing her as "As close to properly mental to anyone I ever met in Wesminster."
As she has stood down as an MP at the next election too probably so she can go job hunting
She’s only 30, and has been an MP for five minutes. How on earth is she standing down?
Doesn't quite match the record of Louise Mensch though, the chick lit novellist was put on Cameron's A List, won Corby in 2010 at 38, got bored after just 2 years and resigned her seat to move to New York city with her music manager husband. Labour then won the seat in the subsequent by election
She's since gone down a rather odd rabbit hole of promoting anti-Trump and anti-Russia conspiracy theories which, even if one approves of the choice of targets, are still conspiracy theories that further poison the well of public discourse.
Was Rishi really a thing after Liz's victory? My recollection was that the British Right was proclaiming her, after decades of false dawns, as the final and authentic embodiment of all their hopes and dreams, and with 'the Anti-Growth Coalition' she had come up with a slogan that would bury Sir Keir an Labour alive. Rishi had completely sunk into nothingness.
He was completely invisible after Truss gaped his hole in the leadership contest. He only re-emerged from inside a Kinder Egg after The Men in Grey Tenas did for her.
Cummings called it very early on, describing her as "As close to properly mental to anyone I ever met in Wesminster."
More seriously, the Russians must know by now that they’re stuffed. Black Sea fleet on it’s way to being completely destroyed as a viable force, the entirety of their Soviet arsenal chewed up into pieces in the fields of Ukraine, along with the flower of both their infantry & cavalry. The only thing keeping them going is a stubborn refusal to admit the inevitable. Still, something might turn up for them I guess - a Trump 2024 victory perhaps? It seems hope is all they have left & hope is not a wining strategy.
On the other hand the great Ukrainian counter-offensive has been a terrifically expensive failure, chewing up tens of thousands of men to gain about 3 villages. Where is the oft-promised breakthrough? The severing of Russia’s land bridge to Crimea?
It’s not happening, is it? We are now in mid September and it all grinds on, pointlessly
Russia cannot win this war (without Trump) but nor, I fear, can Ukraine
They have a breakthrough in southern Ukraine. It’s painstaking work and doesn’t make for good TV so you judge it a failure
They don’t have a breakthrough. From today’s Guardian
“Earlier Maliar had issued a lengthy update on Telegram, claiming that Ukrainian forces have repelled Russian attacks in a number of areas, including in the Kupyansk, Bakhmut, and Marinka directions. Maliar also gave new figures for the amount of territory recaptured by Ukraine. She said 2 sq km had been captured around Bakhmut, and in the past week, and that 51 sq km had been recaptured there since the start of the counteroffensive“
51sq km. That’s about two London boroughs. Maybe 6km by 9km. At a cost of 10,000 men? 20,000? And it’s taken months
Face it, this is not working
They’ve also just sacked 6 defence ministers, which says something in itself
I'm not sure what you expect?
There's no magic way to win a war. You have to destroy the enemy army. Before you have done this they will be able to resist and hold ground.
I think there's decent evidence that Ukraine are inflicting greater losses then they are suffering, and so, if they are inflicting losses on Russia more quickly then Russia can replace those losses, they will eventually reach a point where Russia is unable to defend the current front line. But this will necessarily take time and it will look like not much progress is made while it plays out.
Meanwhile, for example, we can see that Ukraine is able to attack valuable Russians assets almost at will, whole Russia is unable to enforce it's blockade of Ukrainian ports.
Probably the wrong analogy, but in the first world war the British fought an epic battle on the Somme and then a year later another at Passchendaele, both often regarded as at best pyrrhic victories. Yet both were instrumental in the weakening and ultimate defeat of the Imperial German Army. The Somme was described as 'the muddy grave of the German Army' and resulted in the withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line in 1917. After Passchendaele a German general staff publication had "Germany had been brought near to certain destruction (sicheren Untergang) by the Flanders battle of 1917".
Yet after both battles, I suspect @Leon would have been calling them failures.
I cannot see the future, but I think the danger of Russia 'winning' in Ukraine is gone, and its now all about whether Russia can be ejected fully (and at what cost) or if Putin finally gets replaced. Regimes can fall very fast at the end.
It's not a terrible analogy, because it highlights that the enemy army has to be destroyed in order to defeat it, but there are key differences.
The most important is that Ukraine has an advantage with key weapons - drones, HIMARS, Storm Shadow, etc - which means they can destroy the Russian army with considerably less losses than that suffered by the British and French in WWI.
But another key difference is that the combined populations of France and Britain, and the British and French empires, vastly exceeded the population of the kaiser’s Germany. In brutal terms, the western powers could afford to lose more men than Berlin, in the end. And then the Americans joined in, tilting it even further
That is very much not the case here. The Russian population is 3x that of Ukraine
In a brutal war of attrition, this basic maths matters. I also dispute that Ukraine is losing fewer men now, than Russia. Ukraine is on the offensive, that is always more expensive in lives than defence
Ukraine haven't made many direct assaults of the kind that we saw in early June, where we saw damaged Leopard tanks. If they had we would be seeing the photos of it from the Russians. They've deliberately been fighting in a way to minimise casualties. It also sounds like the western kit might not be magic in terms of forcing a breakthrough, but does a great job on saving lives. The Ukrainian tank crews are walking away from most of Western armoured vehicles when they're damaged or destroyed.
So I think it's quite plausible that Ukrainian casualties are lower than Russian.
Also, number of soldiers dead is not likely to be the determinant of Russia reaching a breaking point. Running out of military equipment will come first. This is why Ukraine's success in the artillery war is so important.
Soviet doctrine for their military vehicles was to make as many of them as possible given their large population. As a result their prioritised production over things such as crew protection. This has carried on over into current Russian thinking. The crew of a Russian tank or armoured vehicle is very unlikely to survive. Whereas in the West we realised the need to protect valuable crews an d made smaller numbers of vehicles that prioritised crew safety. As I understand it most crews in knocked out western vehicles have survived.
Ukraine learnt very quickly from one early offensive in June that it couldn't just charge a load of Western tanks/IFVs at Russian defences. They have since been waging a war of attrition against Russia. It is slow but it does seem to be working. Russia has less and less gear even if it still does have lots of manpower. The gear that it has is of car worse quality than what it could use at the start of the war.
Even in manpower it is becoming a struggle for Russia. They are now manning their defence with elite offensive units. Why would they do this unless they had no other choice? Those units will not be used again for offensive operations.
Ukraine is also becoming more and more adapt with its long range weapons. The Black Sea is almost a no-go area now for Russian warships as has been seen over the last week.
It is a long process but I do not see many positives for Russia. It is bloody for Ukraine but things are slowly moving in their direction.
One positive for Russia is that they haven't lost yet, and it's possible that Europe and the US will talk themselves into giving up.
Apparently the favourite in the Slovak election has pledged to stop providing any support for Ukraine. People might scoff at Slovakia's size, but Ukraine has an important joint-venture with them that is delivering new self-propelled artillery, and they've been a firm supporter of Ukraine to this point.
You can't talk yourself into winning a war you are losing, but you can talk yourself into losing a war that you are winning - and I think that's what Leon (and others) are doing.
Believe it or not, I’m trying to be objective. As @Dura_Ace says, you can’t rely on the media to give you a full picture. Too much western media is pompom waving ra-ra Ukraine bullshit - echoed on PB. But the Russian media is even worse from the other side
So you have to weave your way through the minefield of misinformation to reach an informed guess - and it is only a guess - as to what is happening. And my guess is: stalemate
However I do see some hopeful signs for Ukraine. The death of Prigozhin and now, allegedly, Kadyrov - both close allies of Putin, bring assassination ever closer to Vlad himself. He must be paranoid as fuck
More seriously, the Russians must know by now that they’re stuffed. Black Sea fleet on it’s way to being completely destroyed as a viable force, the entirety of their Soviet arsenal chewed up into pieces in the fields of Ukraine, along with the flower of both their infantry & cavalry. The only thing keeping them going is a stubborn refusal to admit the inevitable. Still, something might turn up for them I guess - a Trump 2024 victory perhaps? It seems hope is all they have left & hope is not a wining strategy.
On the other hand the great Ukrainian counter-offensive has been a terrifically expensive failure, chewing up tens of thousands of men to gain about 3 villages. Where is the oft-promised breakthrough? The severing of Russia’s land bridge to Crimea?
It’s not happening, is it? We are now in mid September and it all grinds on, pointlessly
Russia cannot win this war (without Trump) but nor, I fear, can Ukraine
They have a breakthrough in southern Ukraine. It’s painstaking work and doesn’t make for good TV so you judge it a failure
They don’t have a breakthrough. From today’s Guardian
“Earlier Maliar had issued a lengthy update on Telegram, claiming that Ukrainian forces have repelled Russian attacks in a number of areas, including in the Kupyansk, Bakhmut, and Marinka directions. Maliar also gave new figures for the amount of territory recaptured by Ukraine. She said 2 sq km had been captured around Bakhmut, and in the past week, and that 51 sq km had been recaptured there since the start of the counteroffensive“
51sq km. That’s about two London boroughs. Maybe 6km by 9km. At a cost of 10,000 men? 20,000? And it’s taken months
Face it, this is not working
They’ve also just sacked 6 defence ministers, which says something in itself
FWIW Ukraine had a spectacular week last week, including the destruction of a submarine and a landing ship and the rout of an entire Russian Brigade, as well as advances in at least four different areas in the South, East and on the Dnipro.
Putinism is in a terrible state and Russia highly unstable, but sure its Ukraine that is on the back foot...
Leon has reverted to his usual Chicken Licken Ninnyism...
Yes, of course, for merely pointing out the facts on the ground, I am some kind of coward and a ‘fucking appeaser’ and pro Putin and wishing for Ukrainian defeat, etc
"for merely pointing out the facts on the ground"?
God knows why you do it - probably just because you can't resist being a troll - but what you really do is your best impression of someone halfway up Putin's ****.
The tripe you post is no closer to an objective reflection of the facts than the most wildly over-optimistic propaganda coming from the other side.
More seriously, the Russians must know by now that they’re stuffed. Black Sea fleet on it’s way to being completely destroyed as a viable force, the entirety of their Soviet arsenal chewed up into pieces in the fields of Ukraine, along with the flower of both their infantry & cavalry. The only thing keeping them going is a stubborn refusal to admit the inevitable. Still, something might turn up for them I guess - a Trump 2024 victory perhaps? It seems hope is all they have left & hope is not a wining strategy.
On the other hand the great Ukrainian counter-offensive has been a terrifically expensive failure, chewing up tens of thousands of men to gain about 3 villages. Where is the oft-promised breakthrough? The severing of Russia’s land bridge to Crimea?
It’s not happening, is it? We are now in mid September and it all grinds on, pointlessly
Russia cannot win this war (without Trump) but nor, I fear, can Ukraine
They have a breakthrough in southern Ukraine. It’s painstaking work and doesn’t make for good TV so you judge it a failure
They don’t have a breakthrough. From today’s Guardian
“Earlier Maliar had issued a lengthy update on Telegram, claiming that Ukrainian forces have repelled Russian attacks in a number of areas, including in the Kupyansk, Bakhmut, and Marinka directions. Maliar also gave new figures for the amount of territory recaptured by Ukraine. She said 2 sq km had been captured around Bakhmut, and in the past week, and that 51 sq km had been recaptured there since the start of the counteroffensive“
51sq km. That’s about two London boroughs. Maybe 6km by 9km. At a cost of 10,000 men? 20,000? And it’s taken months
Face it, this is not working
They’ve also just sacked 6 defence ministers, which says something in itself
I'm not sure what you expect?
There's no magic way to win a war. You have to destroy the enemy army. Before you have done this they will be able to resist and hold ground.
I think there's decent evidence that Ukraine are inflicting greater losses then they are suffering, and so, if they are inflicting losses on Russia more quickly then Russia can replace those losses, they will eventually reach a point where Russia is unable to defend the current front line. But this will necessarily take time and it will look like not much progress is made while it plays out.
Meanwhile, for example, we can see that Ukraine is able to attack valuable Russians assets almost at will, whole Russia is unable to enforce it's blockade of Ukrainian ports.
Probably the wrong analogy, but in the first world war the British fought an epic battle on the Somme and then a year later another at Passchendaele, both often regarded as at best pyrrhic victories. Yet both were instrumental in the weakening and ultimate defeat of the Imperial German Army. The Somme was described as 'the muddy grave of the German Army' and resulted in the withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line in 1917. After Passchendaele a German general staff publication had "Germany had been brought near to certain destruction (sicheren Untergang) by the Flanders battle of 1917".
Yet after both battles, I suspect @Leon would have been calling them failures.
I cannot see the future, but I think the danger of Russia 'winning' in Ukraine is gone, and its now all about whether Russia can be ejected fully (and at what cost) or if Putin finally gets replaced. Regimes can fall very fast at the end.
It's not a terrible analogy, because it highlights that the enemy army has to be destroyed in order to defeat it, but there are key differences.
The most important is that Ukraine has an advantage with key weapons - drones, HIMARS, Storm Shadow, etc - which means they can destroy the Russian army with considerably less losses than that suffered by the British and French in WWI.
But another key difference is that the combined populations of France and Britain, and the British and French empires, vastly exceeded the population of the kaiser’s Germany. In brutal terms, the western powers could afford to lose more men than Berlin, in the end. And then the Americans joined in, tilting it even further
That is very much not the case here. The Russian population is 3x that of Ukraine
In a brutal war of attrition, this basic maths matters. I also dispute that Ukraine is losing fewer men now, than Russia. Ukraine is on the offensive, that is always more expensive in lives than defence
Ukraine haven't made many direct assaults of the kind that we saw in early June, where we saw damaged Leopard tanks. If they had we would be seeing the photos of it from the Russians. They've deliberately been fighting in a way to minimise casualties. It also sounds like the western kit might not be magic in terms of forcing a breakthrough, but does a great job on saving lives. The Ukrainian tank crews are walking away from most of Western armoured vehicles when they're damaged or destroyed.
So I think it's quite plausible that Ukrainian casualties are lower than Russian.
Also, number of soldiers dead is not likely to be the determinant of Russia reaching a breaking point. Running out of military equipment will come first. This is why Ukraine's success in the artillery war is so important.
Soviet doctrine for their military vehicles was to make as many of them as possible given their large population. As a result their prioritised production over things such as crew protection. This has carried on over into current Russian thinking. The crew of a Russian tank or armoured vehicle is very unlikely to survive. Whereas in the West we realised the need to protect valuable crews an d made smaller numbers of vehicles that prioritised crew safety. As I understand it most crews in knocked out western vehicles have survived.
Ukraine learnt very quickly from one early offensive in June that it couldn't just charge a load of Western tanks/IFVs at Russian defences. They have since been waging a war of attrition against Russia. It is slow but it does seem to be working. Russia has less and less gear even if it still does have lots of manpower. The gear that it has is of car worse quality than what it could use at the start of the war.
Even in manpower it is becoming a struggle for Russia. They are now manning their defence with elite offensive units. Why would they do this unless they had no other choice? Those units will not be used again for offensive operations.
Ukraine is also becoming more and more adapt with its long range weapons. The Black Sea is almost a no-go area now for Russian warships as has been seen over the last week.
It is a long process but I do not see many positives for Russia. It is bloody for Ukraine but things are slowly moving in their direction.
One positive for Russia is that they haven't lost yet, and it's possible that Europe and the US will talk themselves into giving up.
Apparently the favourite in the Slovak election has pledged to stop providing any support for Ukraine. People might scoff at Slovakia's size, but Ukraine has an important joint-venture with them that is delivering new self-propelled artillery, and they've been a firm supporter of Ukraine to this point.
You can't talk yourself into winning a war you are losing, but you can talk yourself into losing a war that you are winning - and I think that's what Leon (and others) are doing.
Believe it or not, I’m trying to be objective. As @Dura_Ace says, you can’t rely on the media to give you a full picture. Too much western media is pompom waving ra-ra Ukraine bullshit - echoed on PB. But the Russian media is even worse from the other side
So you have to weave your way through the minefield of misinformation to reach an informed guess - and it is only a guess - as to what is happening. And my guess is: stalemate
However I do see some hopeful signs for Ukraine. The death of Prigozhin and now, allegedly, Kadyrov - both close allies of Putin, bring assassination ever closer to Vlad himself. He must be paranoid as fuck
Hopefully someone will slot him, asafp
There is an excellent hour long lecture (that is very definitely not Ukrainian flag waving) on Russian arms production that Josias and Nigel both posted.
Tldr: Russia is reactivating a lot of old tanks, and if Ukraine is to win, they need the West to keep up the flow of munitions.
More seriously, the Russians must know by now that they’re stuffed. Black Sea fleet on it’s way to being completely destroyed as a viable force, the entirety of their Soviet arsenal chewed up into pieces in the fields of Ukraine, along with the flower of both their infantry & cavalry. The only thing keeping them going is a stubborn refusal to admit the inevitable. Still, something might turn up for them I guess - a Trump 2024 victory perhaps? It seems hope is all they have left & hope is not a wining strategy.
On the other hand the great Ukrainian counter-offensive has been a terrifically expensive failure, chewing up tens of thousands of men to gain about 3 villages. Where is the oft-promised breakthrough? The severing of Russia’s land bridge to Crimea?
It’s not happening, is it? We are now in mid September and it all grinds on, pointlessly
Russia cannot win this war (without Trump) but nor, I fear, can Ukraine
They have a breakthrough in southern Ukraine. It’s painstaking work and doesn’t make for good TV so you judge it a failure
They don’t have a breakthrough. From today’s Guardian
“Earlier Maliar had issued a lengthy update on Telegram, claiming that Ukrainian forces have repelled Russian attacks in a number of areas, including in the Kupyansk, Bakhmut, and Marinka directions. Maliar also gave new figures for the amount of territory recaptured by Ukraine. She said 2 sq km had been captured around Bakhmut, and in the past week, and that 51 sq km had been recaptured there since the start of the counteroffensive“
51sq km. That’s about two London boroughs. Maybe 6km by 9km. At a cost of 10,000 men? 20,000? And it’s taken months
Face it, this is not working
They’ve also just sacked 6 defence ministers, which says something in itself
I'm not sure what you expect?
There's no magic way to win a war. You have to destroy the enemy army. Before you have done this they will be able to resist and hold ground.
I think there's decent evidence that Ukraine are inflicting greater losses then they are suffering, and so, if they are inflicting losses on Russia more quickly then Russia can replace those losses, they will eventually reach a point where Russia is unable to defend the current front line. But this will necessarily take time and it will look like not much progress is made while it plays out.
Meanwhile, for example, we can see that Ukraine is able to attack valuable Russians assets almost at will, whole Russia is unable to enforce it's blockade of Ukrainian ports.
Probably the wrong analogy, but in the first world war the British fought an epic battle on the Somme and then a year later another at Passchendaele, both often regarded as at best pyrrhic victories. Yet both were instrumental in the weakening and ultimate defeat of the Imperial German Army. The Somme was described as 'the muddy grave of the German Army' and resulted in the withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line in 1917. After Passchendaele a German general staff publication had "Germany had been brought near to certain destruction (sicheren Untergang) by the Flanders battle of 1917".
Yet after both battles, I suspect @Leon would have been calling them failures.
I cannot see the future, but I think the danger of Russia 'winning' in Ukraine is gone, and its now all about whether Russia can be ejected fully (and at what cost) or if Putin finally gets replaced. Regimes can fall very fast at the end.
It's not a terrible analogy, because it highlights that the enemy army has to be destroyed in order to defeat it, but there are key differences.
The most important is that Ukraine has an advantage with key weapons - drones, HIMARS, Storm Shadow, etc - which means they can destroy the Russian army with considerably less losses than that suffered by the British and French in WWI.
But another key difference is that the combined populations of France and Britain, and the British and French empires, vastly exceeded the population of the kaiser’s Germany. In brutal terms, the western powers could afford to lose more men than Berlin, in the end. And then the Americans joined in, tilting it even further
That is very much not the case here. The Russian population is 3x that of Ukraine
In a brutal war of attrition, this basic maths matters. I also dispute that Ukraine is losing fewer men now, than Russia. Ukraine is on the offensive, that is always more expensive in lives than defence
Ukraine haven't made many direct assaults of the kind that we saw in early June, where we saw damaged Leopard tanks. If they had we would be seeing the photos of it from the Russians. They've deliberately been fighting in a way to minimise casualties. It also sounds like the western kit might not be magic in terms of forcing a breakthrough, but does a great job on saving lives. The Ukrainian tank crews are walking away from most of Western armoured vehicles when they're damaged or destroyed.
So I think it's quite plausible that Ukrainian casualties are lower than Russian.
Also, number of soldiers dead is not likely to be the determinant of Russia reaching a breaking point. Running out of military equipment will come first. This is why Ukraine's success in the artillery war is so important.
Soviet doctrine for their military vehicles was to make as many of them as possible given their large population. As a result their prioritised production over things such as crew protection. This has carried on over into current Russian thinking. The crew of a Russian tank or armoured vehicle is very unlikely to survive. Whereas in the West we realised the need to protect valuable crews an d made smaller numbers of vehicles that prioritised crew safety. As I understand it most crews in knocked out western vehicles have survived.
Ukraine learnt very quickly from one early offensive in June that it couldn't just charge a load of Western tanks/IFVs at Russian defences. They have since been waging a war of attrition against Russia. It is slow but it does seem to be working. Russia has less and less gear even if it still does have lots of manpower. The gear that it has is of car worse quality than what it could use at the start of the war.
Even in manpower it is becoming a struggle for Russia. They are now manning their defence with elite offensive units. Why would they do this unless they had no other choice? Those units will not be used again for offensive operations.
Ukraine is also becoming more and more adapt with its long range weapons. The Black Sea is almost a no-go area now for Russian warships as has been seen over the last week.
It is a long process but I do not see many positives for Russia. It is bloody for Ukraine but things are slowly moving in their direction.
One positive for Russia is that they haven't lost yet, and it's possible that Europe and the US will talk themselves into giving up.
Apparently the favourite in the Slovak election has pledged to stop providing any support for Ukraine. People might scoff at Slovakia's size, but Ukraine has an important joint-venture with them that is delivering new self-propelled artillery, and they've been a firm supporter of Ukraine to this point.
You can't talk yourself into winning a war you are losing, but you can talk yourself into losing a war that you are winning - and I think that's what Leon (and others) are doing.
Believe it or not, I’m trying to be objective. As @Dura_Ace says, you can’t rely on the media to give you a full picture. Too much western media is pompom waving ra-ra Ukraine bullshit - echoed on PB. But the Russian media is even worse from the other side
So you have to weave your way through the minefield of misinformation to reach an informed guess - and it is only a guess - as to what is happening. And my guess is: stalemate
However I do see some hopeful signs for Ukraine. The death of Prigozhin and now, allegedly, Kadyrov - both close allies of Putin, bring assassination ever closer to Vlad himself. He must be paranoid as fuck
Hopefully someone will slot him, asafp
If you're trying to be objective then what "objective" reason do you have for saying that the liberation of Crimea is "not gonna happen".
It would be objective to say we don't know yet if its going to happen or not, but there's no objective reason to say it won't happen.
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
As I said earlier joining the single market is the only way to change the EU, and anything else is cosmetic
And at the moment raising that issue is certain to rouse latent Brexit support from its slumber. Single Market is Freedom Of Movement. Single Market is putting all of those terrible Euroregulations back into British Law.
Personally, I'd be fine with that. I'd even be fine if we fully aligned indefinitely and waited for a monthly email from Brussels telling us what new stuff they've come up with for us. (The freedoms at a personal level seem worth it to me.) But it would send the right, and the press, dolally, and Starmer isn't going to touch the button marked "Pressing This Button Is Incredibly Risky". There are enough people who hate all that to give Rishi a liferaft he doesn't deserve.
It's going to be like I said in 2020.
The next thing we try, 2025ish, will be a TCA that realistically co-operates on trade. Vet agreements, standards marking, that sort of thing. It will help a bit, but no- not much. That looks like Starmer's plan. But he won't be PM forever.
Beyond that, it gets speculative, anything might happen, but I haven't seen anything to change my rough schedule.
Single Market will be 2030ish. We can probably chuck in some Union of Customs as well. The Brit deals aren't coming out with anything special, and we can leave CPTPP with six months notice.
And then, who knows? Maybe the UK will be fine tagging along with whatever Brussels says. A lot of it is boring technical stuff, and there is the possibility of being consulted. A bit. I don't think the UK political classes are going to be happy with that, which is why Rejoin might happen, but only under a new generation of politicians.
All a bit rubbish, because the UK is gently bleeding under the current arrangements. But I wouldn't have started here.
But we’re not gently bleeding. We are growing faster than Germany and about the same speed as France
Britain is not in a great position but neither is much of Europe, or, indeed, the world
98% of our problems have nothing to do with Brexit and many of them are down to chronic, self inflicted stupidity and a dysfunctional government and civil service - eg HS2
Oh for goodness sake even if we were roaring away successful and Europe was going off a cliff edge that doesn't mean Brexit is successful. You have to compare what you have gained to what you have lost, not compare us with another country and go 'look they are having problems too'. About the only thing you did get right there is it isn't all about Brexit. There are lots of other stuff that has an impact making your observation utterly pointless. You can only look at the gains and losses.
So the question is has the improvements in exporting and importing to the rest of the world greater than the loss in importing and exporting to Europe. To my mind the answer to that question is very very clear.
If not do the freedoms/restrictions of being outside of Europe in other areas outweigh the freedoms/restrictions of being in Europe. And the answer to that question in my mind is even clearer.
How many times can we repeat this argument? For me, Brexit is Brexit
Regaining sovereignty and proper democracy is really all that I cared about. That’s been done. So for me it is a success. I understand that you differ
What about Britain out of the EU makes it a "proper democracy"? A party that fails to win a majority of votes can still receive a majority of seats. An individual seat is still won by FPTP. Our Commons is still whipped and cajoled by the leadership, and very few votes fall outside of that. A political consensus that drips from the media and tufton street still holds sway. Indeed, the two major parties of government have very little policy differences between them - one of them offering a shit future administered poorly and the other one offering a shit future administered efficiently.
The biggest single win from Brexit has been preventing politicans doing things which they may or may not want to do and saying "EU rules, nothing we can do other than comply".
I'd vote for Brexit again tomorrow, regardless of economic cost, in order to prevent them getting that nasty little figleaf back (most of the time it was things they wanted to do, but the public wouldn't wear). A democracy where the top elected politicans can plausibly claim they are being made to do things the voters don't want by a higher power is not a proper democracy by any standard.
La Truss has been giving her speech today. She was the top elected politician, tried to do something, and was forced instead to do things that voters don't want by a higher power.
So Britain needs to leave the international money markets. Take Back Control of our lives by going back to simpler times where we simply took the things we wanted and sent a gunboat to shoot anyone who thought that was a bad idea.
The 'international money markets' have decided that Sunak's way is twice as shit as Truss's way.
In what way? I don't want to defend Sunak/Hunt too vehemently, but the pound is a fair bit stronger than it was with Truss/Kwarteng at the helm, and the Bank of England hasn't needed to come in with a multi-billion pound package to stave off an imminent collapse in pension funds. It's not a high bar, but they do appear to have cleared it.
My guess is that he is referring to interest rates or gilt yields. But this, amongst other things, completely ignores the international increases in both since Truss's unlamented premiership.
But what's changed internationally to cause the increases since?
Part of the problem is that the markets were horribly mispriced last year. They hadn't properly accounted for the global disruptions, inflationary pressures and the cost of energy bailouts etc
And Truss's announcements started the process of pulling back the curtain on that, which led to a shock, but the shock would have happened either way. The price rises were due either way.
Truss screwed up by lumping all her stuff in with what should have been standalone pieces, and in doing so she acted as a human shield. It was stupid politics, stupid media management, more than stupid economics.
I think that that is a slightly parochial way of looking at things.
What Truss did, that scared the markets, was dramatically increase spending, specifically on a ridiculously generous energy scheme, and decrease taxes at the same time without any explanation from the OBR as to how this was going to work out. An insolvency or run away inflation as we printed more money to pay the bills seemed likely scenarios and the market panicked. Hunt was able to calm them down again by cancelling the tax cuts, massively cutting back on the energy subsidy and getting the OBR to sign off on it.
Since then the international situation has deteriorated with the inflationary consequences of energy subsidy coming to bear forcing central banks to increase base rates very substantially and moving back into a more "normal" interest rate world. The first crisis was home made and down to Truss. The ongoing crisis is one we share with nearly all western nations to varying degrees.
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
There are some small changes that shouldn’t be too controversial and the EU would likely agree with . A large scale re-negotiation I agree is out of the question.
Ergo, one way or another, Starmer is lying. Not for the first time
He said he’d like to re-write the deal . We don’t know what if any changes are possible until we get to that point . Not sure it’s fair to accuse him of lying . The EU has a lot more goodwill towards Labour than the handmaidens of Brexit.
If you rule out SM/CU then the golden goose was really Horizon and Sunak has already plucked it. It may be possible to have more trusted trader schemes etc but that will make very little difference to 99.9% of the population.
Starmer made remarks about ‘getting a better EU deal for my kids’ and to me that means, probably, restoring some kind of Free Movement
I do wonder if he will go for it
Some sort of freedom of movement might be possible. The reality is that this exists already. I was doing a trial recently where one of the charges was attempting to pervert the course of justice. The accused was an Algerian but had been living here pretending to have been French (using false documents) and pretending to be covered by the transitional provisions applicable at the time of Brexit. Millions of people were granted such rights with very little inquiry and it does not take a lot of imagination to conclude that a fair number of these will have been for those wanting to sell a package of documentation to the likes of that Algerian.
I largely agree. I never had issues with Free Movement and it is now clear - as has been said on here - that neither party has any intention (or ability?) to really tackle mass immigration
So it is arguable we might as well get the benefits of the Single Market - perhaps
Pretty soon all the parties will be doing things to tackle mass immigration.
Not while the parties are convinced we need immigration to fill low-skilled jobs workshy Brits refuse, to do highly-skilled jobs like doctors and nurses that we don't train enough of and to counter the demographic timebomb. Something something Japan.
Truly back to 2015
Perhaps. But I await someone to propose an alternative: 1 Too many Brits are workshy. We have an attitude problem as a workforce compared to so many from eastern Europe and elsewhere. Despite a positive push of people out of the UK after Brexit, Brits haven't filled these jobs because they don't want them and never did. 2 Where we need skilled workers, we don't want to invest in training them. Things like the nursing bursary being cut are wholly counter-productive. "we can't afford it" ignores the costs of not having it, as usual. 3 I get repeatedly assured by PB Brexiteers that the likes of fruit farms should automate. Except that they can't because they don't have the money and the industry is financially a basket case. We have scrapped the hated CAP and replaced it with nothing. Farmers hated being told what to do for the money, voted to leave, and now have all the freedom but no actual money
Alternative: Pay people more.
If people are paid more then they will apply to do those jobs they don't want to do at shit wages (1).
If people are paid more and treated professionally, they'll get engaged with training (2).
If there's no money for training or investment then the businesses that are failing should go bust and someone else should be able to buy the land for a song and invest in productivity, whether it be investment in automation or investment in training professionals paid a decent salary.
If you're unproductive, you have no divine right for the government to solve your problems for you. That's a "you" problem.
I absolutely agree with this for the private sector.
For nursing it doesn't work though. You can't just say "If there's no money for training or investment then" health providers" should go bust.
The problem comes when we consider the food industry as a whole, which absolutely is necessary. If there is not enough food, people start to take things into their own hands. There seems to be a lot of weight heaped onto the assumption "and someone else should be able to buy the land for a song and invest in productivity, whether it be investment in automation or investment in training professionals paid a decent salary."
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
As I said earlier joining the single market is the only way to change the EU, and anything else is cosmetic
And at the moment raising that issue is certain to rouse latent Brexit support from its slumber. Single Market is Freedom Of Movement. Single Market is putting all of those terrible Euroregulations back into British Law.
Personally, I'd be fine with that. I'd even be fine if we fully aligned indefinitely and waited for a monthly email from Brussels telling us what new stuff they've come up with for us. (The freedoms at a personal level seem worth it to me.) But it would send the right, and the press, dolally, and Starmer isn't going to touch the button marked "Pressing This Button Is Incredibly Risky". There are enough people who hate all that to give Rishi a liferaft he doesn't deserve.
It's going to be like I said in 2020.
The next thing we try, 2025ish, will be a TCA that realistically co-operates on trade. Vet agreements, standards marking, that sort of thing. It will help a bit, but no- not much. That looks like Starmer's plan. But he won't be PM forever.
Beyond that, it gets speculative, anything might happen, but I haven't seen anything to change my rough schedule.
Single Market will be 2030ish. We can probably chuck in some Union of Customs as well. The Brit deals aren't coming out with anything special, and we can leave CPTPP with six months notice.
And then, who knows? Maybe the UK will be fine tagging along with whatever Brussels says. A lot of it is boring technical stuff, and there is the possibility of being consulted. A bit. I don't think the UK political classes are going to be happy with that, which is why Rejoin might happen, but only under a new generation of politicians.
All a bit rubbish, because the UK is gently bleeding under the current arrangements. But I wouldn't have started here.
But we’re not gently bleeding. We are growing faster than Germany and about the same speed as France
Britain is not in a great position but neither is much of Europe, or, indeed, the world
98% of our problems have nothing to do with Brexit and many of them are down to chronic, self inflicted stupidity and a dysfunctional government and civil service - eg HS2
Oh for goodness sake even if we were roaring away successful and Europe was going off a cliff edge that doesn't mean Brexit is successful. You have to compare what you have gained to what you have lost, not compare us with another country and go 'look they are having problems too'. About the only thing you did get right there is it isn't all about Brexit. There are lots of other stuff that has an impact making your observation utterly pointless. You can only look at the gains and losses.
So the question is has the improvements in exporting and importing to the rest of the world greater than the loss in importing and exporting to Europe. To my mind the answer to that question is very very clear.
If not do the freedoms/restrictions of being outside of Europe in other areas outweigh the freedoms/restrictions of being in Europe. And the answer to that question in my mind is even clearer.
How many times can we repeat this argument? For me, Brexit is Brexit
Regaining sovereignty and proper democracy is really all that I cared about. That’s been done. So for me it is a success. I understand that you differ
What about Britain out of the EU makes it a "proper democracy"? A party that fails to win a majority of votes can still receive a majority of seats. An individual seat is still won by FPTP. Our Commons is still whipped and cajoled by the leadership, and very few votes fall outside of that. A political consensus that drips from the media and tufton street still holds sway. Indeed, the two major parties of government have very little policy differences between them - one of them offering a shit future administered poorly and the other one offering a shit future administered efficiently.
The biggest single win from Brexit has been preventing politicans doing things which they may or may not want to do and saying "EU rules, nothing we can do other than comply".
I'd vote for Brexit again tomorrow, regardless of economic cost, in order to prevent them getting that nasty little figleaf back (most of the time it was things they wanted to do, but the public wouldn't wear). A democracy where the top elected politicans can plausibly claim they are being made to do things the voters don't want by a higher power is not a proper democracy by any standard.
La Truss has been giving her speech today. She was the top elected politician, tried to do something, and was forced instead to do things that voters don't want by a higher power.
So Britain needs to leave the international money markets. Take Back Control of our lives by going back to simpler times where we simply took the things we wanted and sent a gunboat to shoot anyone who thought that was a bad idea.
The 'international money markets' have decided that Sunak's way is twice as shit as Truss's way.
In what way? I don't want to defend Sunak/Hunt too vehemently, but the pound is a fair bit stronger than it was with Truss/Kwarteng at the helm, and the Bank of England hasn't needed to come in with a multi-billion pound package to stave off an imminent collapse in pension funds. It's not a high bar, but they do appear to have cleared it.
My guess is that he is referring to interest rates or gilt yields. But this, amongst other things, completely ignores the international increases in both since Truss's unlamented premiership.
But what's changed internationally to cause the increases since?
Part of the problem is that the markets were horribly mispriced last year. They hadn't properly accounted for the global disruptions, inflationary pressures and the cost of energy bailouts etc
And Truss's announcements started the process of pulling back the curtain on that, which led to a shock, but the shock would have happened either way. The price rises were due either way.
Truss screwed up by lumping all her stuff in with what should have been standalone pieces, and in doing so she acted as a human shield. It was stupid politics, stupid media management, more than stupid economics.
I think that that is a slightly parochial way of looking at things.
What Truss did, that scared the markets, was dramatically increase spending, specifically on a ridiculously generous energy scheme, and decrease taxes at the same time without any explanation from the OBR as to how this was going to work out. An insolvency or run away inflation as we printed more money to pay the bills seemed likely scenarios and the market panicked. Hunt was able to calm them down again by cancelling the tax cuts, massively cutting back on the energy subsidy and getting the OBR to sign off on it.
Since then the international situation has deteriorated with the inflationary consequences of energy subsidy coming to bear forcing central banks to increase base rates very substantially and moving back into a more "normal" interest rate world. The first crisis was home made and down to Truss. The ongoing crisis is one we share with nearly all western nations to varying degrees.
The first and second crisis are the same crisis - the cost of the energy bailout.
Any PM would have needed to do some sort of energy bailout, its why every country did one and that cost has come to bear, yes.
Where Truss was stupid was mixing her own policies in with the bailout which meant the entire poison of the energy scheme got lambasted as being due to her incredibly tiny in comparison tax changes.
Its was beyond stupid politics, but economically some sort of energy bailout would have been required either way and the cost of that would have had an impact either way, which is what we've seen.
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
As I said earlier joining the single market is the only way to change the EU, and anything else is cosmetic
And at the moment raising that issue is certain to rouse latent Brexit support from its slumber. Single Market is Freedom Of Movement. Single Market is putting all of those terrible Euroregulations back into British Law.
Personally, I'd be fine with that. I'd even be fine if we fully aligned indefinitely and waited for a monthly email from Brussels telling us what new stuff they've come up with for us. (The freedoms at a personal level seem worth it to me.) But it would send the right, and the press, dolally, and Starmer isn't going to touch the button marked "Pressing This Button Is Incredibly Risky". There are enough people who hate all that to give Rishi a liferaft he doesn't deserve.
It's going to be like I said in 2020.
The next thing we try, 2025ish, will be a TCA that realistically co-operates on trade. Vet agreements, standards marking, that sort of thing. It will help a bit, but no- not much. That looks like Starmer's plan. But he won't be PM forever.
Beyond that, it gets speculative, anything might happen, but I haven't seen anything to change my rough schedule.
Single Market will be 2030ish. We can probably chuck in some Union of Customs as well. The Brit deals aren't coming out with anything special, and we can leave CPTPP with six months notice.
And then, who knows? Maybe the UK will be fine tagging along with whatever Brussels says. A lot of it is boring technical stuff, and there is the possibility of being consulted. A bit. I don't think the UK political classes are going to be happy with that, which is why Rejoin might happen, but only under a new generation of politicians.
All a bit rubbish, because the UK is gently bleeding under the current arrangements. But I wouldn't have started here.
But we’re not gently bleeding. We are growing faster than Germany and about the same speed as France
Britain is not in a great position but neither is much of Europe, or, indeed, the world
98% of our problems have nothing to do with Brexit and many of them are down to chronic, self inflicted stupidity and a dysfunctional government and civil service - eg HS2
Oh for goodness sake even if we were roaring away successful and Europe was going off a cliff edge that doesn't mean Brexit is successful. You have to compare what you have gained to what you have lost, not compare us with another country and go 'look they are having problems too'. About the only thing you did get right there is it isn't all about Brexit. There are lots of other stuff that has an impact making your observation utterly pointless. You can only look at the gains and losses.
So the question is has the improvements in exporting and importing to the rest of the world greater than the loss in importing and exporting to Europe. To my mind the answer to that question is very very clear.
If not do the freedoms/restrictions of being outside of Europe in other areas outweigh the freedoms/restrictions of being in Europe. And the answer to that question in my mind is even clearer.
How many times can we repeat this argument? For me, Brexit is Brexit
Regaining sovereignty and proper democracy is really all that I cared about. That’s been done. So for me it is a success. I understand that you differ
What about Britain out of the EU makes it a "proper democracy"? A party that fails to win a majority of votes can still receive a majority of seats. An individual seat is still won by FPTP. Our Commons is still whipped and cajoled by the leadership, and very few votes fall outside of that. A political consensus that drips from the media and tufton street still holds sway. Indeed, the two major parties of government have very little policy differences between them - one of them offering a shit future administered poorly and the other one offering a shit future administered efficiently.
The biggest single win from Brexit has been preventing politicans doing things which they may or may not want to do and saying "EU rules, nothing we can do other than comply".
I'd vote for Brexit again tomorrow, regardless of economic cost, in order to prevent them getting that nasty little figleaf back (most of the time it was things they wanted to do, but the public wouldn't wear). A democracy where the top elected politicans can plausibly claim they are being made to do things the voters don't want by a higher power is not a proper democracy by any standard.
La Truss has been giving her speech today. She was the top elected politician, tried to do something, and was forced instead to do things that voters don't want by a higher power.
So Britain needs to leave the international money markets. Take Back Control of our lives by going back to simpler times where we simply took the things we wanted and sent a gunboat to shoot anyone who thought that was a bad idea.
The 'international money markets' have decided that Sunak's way is twice as shit as Truss's way.
In what way? I don't want to defend Sunak/Hunt too vehemently, but the pound is a fair bit stronger than it was with Truss/Kwarteng at the helm, and the Bank of England hasn't needed to come in with a multi-billion pound package to stave off an imminent collapse in pension funds. It's not a high bar, but they do appear to have cleared it.
My guess is that he is referring to interest rates or gilt yields. But this, amongst other things, completely ignores the international increases in both since Truss's unlamented premiership.
But what's changed internationally to cause the increases since?
Part of the problem is that the markets were horribly mispriced last year. They hadn't properly accounted for the global disruptions, inflationary pressures and the cost of energy bailouts etc
And Truss's announcements started the process of pulling back the curtain on that, which led to a shock, but the shock would have happened either way. The price rises were due either way.
Truss screwed up by lumping all her stuff in with what should have been standalone pieces, and in doing so she acted as a human shield. It was stupid politics, stupid media management, more than stupid economics.
I think that that is a slightly parochial way of looking at things.
What Truss did, that scared the markets, was dramatically increase spending, specifically on a ridiculously generous energy scheme, and decrease taxes at the same time without any explanation from the OBR as to how this was going to work out. An insolvency or run away inflation as we printed more money to pay the bills seemed likely scenarios and the market panicked. Hunt was able to calm them down again by cancelling the tax cuts, massively cutting back on the energy subsidy and getting the OBR to sign off on it.
Since then the international situation has deteriorated with the inflationary consequences of energy subsidy coming to bear forcing central banks to increase base rates very substantially and moving back into a more "normal" interest rate world. The first crisis was home made and down to Truss. The ongoing crisis is one we share with nearly all western nations to varying degrees.
It was also the seeming disconnect between monetary policy and fiscal policy. If the Bank of England had already started tightening then it might have landed differently.
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
There are some small changes that shouldn’t be too controversial and the EU would likely agree with . A large scale re-negotiation I agree is out of the question.
Ergo, one way or another, Starmer is lying. Not for the first time
He said he’d like to re-write the deal . We don’t know what if any changes are possible until we get to that point . Not sure it’s fair to accuse him of lying . The EU has a lot more goodwill towards Labour than the handmaidens of Brexit.
If you rule out SM/CU then the golden goose was really Horizon and Sunak has already plucked it. It may be possible to have more trusted trader schemes etc but that will make very little difference to 99.9% of the population.
Starmer made remarks about ‘getting a better EU deal for my kids’ and to me that means, probably, restoring some kind of Free Movement
I do wonder if he will go for it
Some sort of freedom of movement might be possible. The reality is that this exists already. I was doing a trial recently where one of the charges was attempting to pervert the course of justice. The accused was an Algerian but had been living here pretending to have been French (using false documents) and pretending to be covered by the transitional provisions applicable at the time of Brexit. Millions of people were granted such rights with very little inquiry and it does not take a lot of imagination to conclude that a fair number of these will have been for those wanting to sell a package of documentation to the likes of that Algerian.
I largely agree. I never had issues with Free Movement and it is now clear - as has been said on here - that neither party has any intention (or ability?) to really tackle mass immigration
So it is arguable we might as well get the benefits of the Single Market - perhaps
Pretty soon all the parties will be doing things to tackle mass immigration.
Not while the parties are convinced we need immigration to fill low-skilled jobs workshy Brits refuse, to do highly-skilled jobs like doctors and nurses that we don't train enough of and to counter the demographic timebomb. Something something Japan.
Truly back to 2015
Perhaps. But I await someone to propose an alternative: 1 Too many Brits are workshy. We have an attitude problem as a workforce compared to so many from eastern Europe and elsewhere. Despite a positive push of people out of the UK after Brexit, Brits haven't filled these jobs because they don't want them and never did. 2 Where we need skilled workers, we don't want to invest in training them. Things like the nursing bursary being cut are wholly counter-productive. "we can't afford it" ignores the costs of not having it, as usual. 3 I get repeatedly assured by PB Brexiteers that the likes of fruit farms should automate. Except that they can't because they don't have the money and the industry is financially a basket case. We have scrapped the hated CAP and replaced it with nothing. Farmers hated being told what to do for the money, voted to leave, and now have all the freedom but no actual money
Alternative: Pay people more.
If people are paid more then they will apply to do those jobs they don't want to do at shit wages (1).
If people are paid more and treated professionally, they'll get engaged with training (2).
If there's no money for training or investment then the businesses that are failing should go bust and someone else should be able to buy the land for a song and invest in productivity, whether it be investment in automation or investment in training professionals paid a decent salary.
If you're unproductive, you have no divine right for the government to solve your problems for you. That's a "you" problem.
I absolutely agree with this for the private sector.
For nursing it doesn't work though. You can't just say "If there's no money for training or investment then" health providers" should go bust.
The problem comes when we consider the food industry as a whole, which absolutely is necessary. If there is not enough food, people start to take things into their own hands. There seems to be a lot of weight heaped onto the assumption "and someone else should be able to buy the land for a song and invest in productivity, whether it be investment in automation or investment in training professionals paid a decent salary."
Why would there not be enough food?
If British food is competitive then prices would rise accordingly which would fund the investments needed.
Or if British food is uncompetitive then imports would rise accordingly, which would mean food remains on the shelf, in which case the failed businesses domestically can be replaced with new ones that will invest and look to regain market share.
More seriously, the Russians must know by now that they’re stuffed. Black Sea fleet on it’s way to being completely destroyed as a viable force, the entirety of their Soviet arsenal chewed up into pieces in the fields of Ukraine, along with the flower of both their infantry & cavalry. The only thing keeping them going is a stubborn refusal to admit the inevitable. Still, something might turn up for them I guess - a Trump 2024 victory perhaps? It seems hope is all they have left & hope is not a wining strategy.
On the other hand the great Ukrainian counter-offensive has been a terrifically expensive failure, chewing up tens of thousands of men to gain about 3 villages. Where is the oft-promised breakthrough? The severing of Russia’s land bridge to Crimea?
It’s not happening, is it? We are now in mid September and it all grinds on, pointlessly
Russia cannot win this war (without Trump) but nor, I fear, can Ukraine
They have a breakthrough in southern Ukraine. It’s painstaking work and doesn’t make for good TV so you judge it a failure
They don’t have a breakthrough. From today’s Guardian
“Earlier Maliar had issued a lengthy update on Telegram, claiming that Ukrainian forces have repelled Russian attacks in a number of areas, including in the Kupyansk, Bakhmut, and Marinka directions. Maliar also gave new figures for the amount of territory recaptured by Ukraine. She said 2 sq km had been captured around Bakhmut, and in the past week, and that 51 sq km had been recaptured there since the start of the counteroffensive“
51sq km. That’s about two London boroughs. Maybe 6km by 9km. At a cost of 10,000 men? 20,000? And it’s taken months
Face it, this is not working
They’ve also just sacked 6 defence ministers, which says something in itself
I'm not sure what you expect?
There's no magic way to win a war. You have to destroy the enemy army. Before you have done this they will be able to resist and hold ground.
I think there's decent evidence that Ukraine are inflicting greater losses then they are suffering, and so, if they are inflicting losses on Russia more quickly then Russia can replace those losses, they will eventually reach a point where Russia is unable to defend the current front line. But this will necessarily take time and it will look like not much progress is made while it plays out.
Meanwhile, for example, we can see that Ukraine is able to attack valuable Russians assets almost at will, whole Russia is unable to enforce it's blockade of Ukrainian ports.
Probably the wrong analogy, but in the first world war the British fought an epic battle on the Somme and then a year later another at Passchendaele, both often regarded as at best pyrrhic victories. Yet both were instrumental in the weakening and ultimate defeat of the Imperial German Army. The Somme was described as 'the muddy grave of the German Army' and resulted in the withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line in 1917. After Passchendaele a German general staff publication had "Germany had been brought near to certain destruction (sicheren Untergang) by the Flanders battle of 1917".
Yet after both battles, I suspect @Leon would have been calling them failures.
I cannot see the future, but I think the danger of Russia 'winning' in Ukraine is gone, and its now all about whether Russia can be ejected fully (and at what cost) or if Putin finally gets replaced. Regimes can fall very fast at the end.
It's not a terrible analogy, because it highlights that the enemy army has to be destroyed in order to defeat it, but there are key differences.
The most important is that Ukraine has an advantage with key weapons - drones, HIMARS, Storm Shadow, etc - which means they can destroy the Russian army with considerably less losses than that suffered by the British and French in WWI.
But another key difference is that the combined populations of France and Britain, and the British and French empires, vastly exceeded the population of the kaiser’s Germany. In brutal terms, the western powers could afford to lose more men than Berlin, in the end. And then the Americans joined in, tilting it even further
That is very much not the case here. The Russian population is 3x that of Ukraine
In a brutal war of attrition, this basic maths matters. I also dispute that Ukraine is losing fewer men now, than Russia. Ukraine is on the offensive, that is always more expensive in lives than defence
Ukraine haven't made many direct assaults of the kind that we saw in early June, where we saw damaged Leopard tanks. If they had we would be seeing the photos of it from the Russians. They've deliberately been fighting in a way to minimise casualties. It also sounds like the western kit might not be magic in terms of forcing a breakthrough, but does a great job on saving lives. The Ukrainian tank crews are walking away from most of Western armoured vehicles when they're damaged or destroyed.
So I think it's quite plausible that Ukrainian casualties are lower than Russian.
Also, number of soldiers dead is not likely to be the determinant of Russia reaching a breaking point. Running out of military equipment will come first. This is why Ukraine's success in the artillery war is so important.
Soviet doctrine for their military vehicles was to make as many of them as possible given their large population. As a result their prioritised production over things such as crew protection. This has carried on over into current Russian thinking. The crew of a Russian tank or armoured vehicle is very unlikely to survive. Whereas in the West we realised the need to protect valuable crews an d made smaller numbers of vehicles that prioritised crew safety. As I understand it most crews in knocked out western vehicles have survived.
Ukraine learnt very quickly from one early offensive in June that it couldn't just charge a load of Western tanks/IFVs at Russian defences. They have since been waging a war of attrition against Russia. It is slow but it does seem to be working. Russia has less and less gear even if it still does have lots of manpower. The gear that it has is of car worse quality than what it could use at the start of the war.
Even in manpower it is becoming a struggle for Russia. They are now manning their defence with elite offensive units. Why would they do this unless they had no other choice? Those units will not be used again for offensive operations.
Ukraine is also becoming more and more adapt with its long range weapons. The Black Sea is almost a no-go area now for Russian warships as has been seen over the last week.
It is a long process but I do not see many positives for Russia. It is bloody for Ukraine but things are slowly moving in their direction.
One positive for Russia is that they haven't lost yet, and it's possible that Europe and the US will talk themselves into giving up.
Apparently the favourite in the Slovak election has pledged to stop providing any support for Ukraine. People might scoff at Slovakia's size, but Ukraine has an important joint-venture with them that is delivering new self-propelled artillery, and they've been a firm supporter of Ukraine to this point.
You can't talk yourself into winning a war you are losing, but you can talk yourself into losing a war that you are winning - and I think that's what Leon (and others) are doing.
Believe it or not, I’m trying to be objective. As @Dura_Ace says, you can’t rely on the media to give you a full picture. Too much western media is pompom waving ra-ra Ukraine bullshit - echoed on PB. But the Russian media is even worse from the other side
The Russian media is not exclusively stanning for the SMO. There is a significant strand of opinion that is highly critical of the effort but only that it is being executed with insufficient competence and aggression. This is a line that is pushed repeatedly by the fecund ecology of think tanks that exist around United Russia (Russia Project, Centre for Whatever, etc.) but outside the Duma. These are generally founded by and funded in great secrecy by oligarchs who want to strengthen a policy position extramural to the Duma. If a move against VVP comes, which I don't think is likely but really who the fuck knows, then it will arise from that political axis.
This is presumably part of the motivation for Dimon's extremely verbose but carefully calibrated bellicosity on Telegram. He does not want to seem of that ultra-nationalist think tank milieu but he also does not want to seem not of it.
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
As I said earlier joining the single market is the only way to change the EU, and anything else is cosmetic
And at the moment raising that issue is certain to rouse latent Brexit support from its slumber. Single Market is Freedom Of Movement. Single Market is putting all of those terrible Euroregulations back into British Law.
Personally, I'd be fine with that. I'd even be fine if we fully aligned indefinitely and waited for a monthly email from Brussels telling us what new stuff they've come up with for us. (The freedoms at a personal level seem worth it to me.) But it would send the right, and the press, dolally, and Starmer isn't going to touch the button marked "Pressing This Button Is Incredibly Risky". There are enough people who hate all that to give Rishi a liferaft he doesn't deserve.
It's going to be like I said in 2020.
The next thing we try, 2025ish, will be a TCA that realistically co-operates on trade. Vet agreements, standards marking, that sort of thing. It will help a bit, but no- not much. That looks like Starmer's plan. But he won't be PM forever.
Beyond that, it gets speculative, anything might happen, but I haven't seen anything to change my rough schedule.
Single Market will be 2030ish. We can probably chuck in some Union of Customs as well. The Brit deals aren't coming out with anything special, and we can leave CPTPP with six months notice.
And then, who knows? Maybe the UK will be fine tagging along with whatever Brussels says. A lot of it is boring technical stuff, and there is the possibility of being consulted. A bit. I don't think the UK political classes are going to be happy with that, which is why Rejoin might happen, but only under a new generation of politicians.
All a bit rubbish, because the UK is gently bleeding under the current arrangements. But I wouldn't have started here.
But we’re not gently bleeding. We are growing faster than Germany and about the same speed as France
Britain is not in a great position but neither is much of Europe, or, indeed, the world
98% of our problems have nothing to do with Brexit and many of them are down to chronic, self inflicted stupidity and a dysfunctional government and civil service - eg HS2
Oh for goodness sake even if we were roaring away successful and Europe was going off a cliff edge that doesn't mean Brexit is successful. You have to compare what you have gained to what you have lost, not compare us with another country and go 'look they are having problems too'. About the only thing you did get right there is it isn't all about Brexit. There are lots of other stuff that has an impact making your observation utterly pointless. You can only look at the gains and losses.
So the question is has the improvements in exporting and importing to the rest of the world greater than the loss in importing and exporting to Europe. To my mind the answer to that question is very very clear.
If not do the freedoms/restrictions of being outside of Europe in other areas outweigh the freedoms/restrictions of being in Europe. And the answer to that question in my mind is even clearer.
How many times can we repeat this argument? For me, Brexit is Brexit
Regaining sovereignty and proper democracy is really all that I cared about. That’s been done. So for me it is a success. I understand that you differ
What about Britain out of the EU makes it a "proper democracy"? A party that fails to win a majority of votes can still receive a majority of seats. An individual seat is still won by FPTP. Our Commons is still whipped and cajoled by the leadership, and very few votes fall outside of that. A political consensus that drips from the media and tufton street still holds sway. Indeed, the two major parties of government have very little policy differences between them - one of them offering a shit future administered poorly and the other one offering a shit future administered efficiently.
The biggest single win from Brexit has been preventing politicans doing things which they may or may not want to do and saying "EU rules, nothing we can do other than comply".
I'd vote for Brexit again tomorrow, regardless of economic cost, in order to prevent them getting that nasty little figleaf back (most of the time it was things they wanted to do, but the public wouldn't wear). A democracy where the top elected politicans can plausibly claim they are being made to do things the voters don't want by a higher power is not a proper democracy by any standard.
La Truss has been giving her speech today. She was the top elected politician, tried to do something, and was forced instead to do things that voters don't want by a higher power.
So Britain needs to leave the international money markets. Take Back Control of our lives by going back to simpler times where we simply took the things we wanted and sent a gunboat to shoot anyone who thought that was a bad idea.
The 'international money markets' have decided that Sunak's way is twice as shit as Truss's way.
In what way? I don't want to defend Sunak/Hunt too vehemently, but the pound is a fair bit stronger than it was with Truss/Kwarteng at the helm, and the Bank of England hasn't needed to come in with a multi-billion pound package to stave off an imminent collapse in pension funds. It's not a high bar, but they do appear to have cleared it.
My guess is that he is referring to interest rates or gilt yields. But this, amongst other things, completely ignores the international increases in both since Truss's unlamented premiership.
But what's changed internationally to cause the increases since?
Part of the problem is that the markets were horribly mispriced last year. They hadn't properly accounted for the global disruptions, inflationary pressures and the cost of energy bailouts etc
And Truss's announcements started the process of pulling back the curtain on that, which led to a shock, but the shock would have happened either way. The price rises were due either way.
Truss screwed up by lumping all her stuff in with what should have been standalone pieces, and in doing so she acted as a human shield. It was stupid politics, stupid media management, more than stupid economics.
I think that that is a slightly parochial way of looking at things.
What Truss did, that scared the markets, was dramatically increase spending, specifically on a ridiculously generous energy scheme, and decrease taxes at the same time without any explanation from the OBR as to how this was going to work out. An insolvency or run away inflation as we printed more money to pay the bills seemed likely scenarios and the market panicked. Hunt was able to calm them down again by cancelling the tax cuts, massively cutting back on the energy subsidy and getting the OBR to sign off on it.
Since then the international situation has deteriorated with the inflationary consequences of energy subsidy coming to bear forcing central banks to increase base rates very substantially and moving back into a more "normal" interest rate world. The first crisis was home made and down to Truss. The ongoing crisis is one we share with nearly all western nations to varying degrees.
The first and second crisis are the same crisis - the cost of the energy bailout.
Any PM would have needed to do some sort of energy bailout, its why every country did one and that cost has come to bear, yes.
Where Truss was stupid was mixing her own policies in with the bailout which meant the entire poison of the energy scheme got lambasted as being due to her incredibly tiny in comparison tax changes.
Its was beyond stupid politics, but economically some sort of energy bailout would have been required either way and the cost of that would have had an impact either way, which is what we've seen.
Yes, but she wrote a blank cheque and had literally no idea what it was going to be cashed for. Whilst cutting taxes. A medium sized country like the UK can't get away with that. Only the US can and maybe not for much longer.
More seriously, the Russians must know by now that they’re stuffed. Black Sea fleet on it’s way to being completely destroyed as a viable force, the entirety of their Soviet arsenal chewed up into pieces in the fields of Ukraine, along with the flower of both their infantry & cavalry. The only thing keeping them going is a stubborn refusal to admit the inevitable. Still, something might turn up for them I guess - a Trump 2024 victory perhaps? It seems hope is all they have left & hope is not a wining strategy.
There was recent speculation about a winning strategy for Russia. Wait for winter then destroy Ukraine's energy infrastructure. OK, it is probably a war crime but will Putin care?
With what armaments? They tried that last winter & Ukraine has better air defences now than it did then.
IIRC Russia was meant to run out of missiles in october 2022. Whatever happened to that prediction?
Russian missile and artillery intensity has dropped sharply, though. They are still building new missiles and shells, but they have run through a lot of their stockpiles.
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
As I said earlier joining the single market is the only way to change the EU, and anything else is cosmetic
And at the moment raising that issue is certain to rouse latent Brexit support from its slumber. Single Market is Freedom Of Movement. Single Market is putting all of those terrible Euroregulations back into British Law.
Personally, I'd be fine with that. I'd even be fine if we fully aligned indefinitely and waited for a monthly email from Brussels telling us what new stuff they've come up with for us. (The freedoms at a personal level seem worth it to me.) But it would send the right, and the press, dolally, and Starmer isn't going to touch the button marked "Pressing This Button Is Incredibly Risky". There are enough people who hate all that to give Rishi a liferaft he doesn't deserve.
It's going to be like I said in 2020.
The next thing we try, 2025ish, will be a TCA that realistically co-operates on trade. Vet agreements, standards marking, that sort of thing. It will help a bit, but no- not much. That looks like Starmer's plan. But he won't be PM forever.
Beyond that, it gets speculative, anything might happen, but I haven't seen anything to change my rough schedule.
Single Market will be 2030ish. We can probably chuck in some Union of Customs as well. The Brit deals aren't coming out with anything special, and we can leave CPTPP with six months notice.
And then, who knows? Maybe the UK will be fine tagging along with whatever Brussels says. A lot of it is boring technical stuff, and there is the possibility of being consulted. A bit. I don't think the UK political classes are going to be happy with that, which is why Rejoin might happen, but only under a new generation of politicians.
All a bit rubbish, because the UK is gently bleeding under the current arrangements. But I wouldn't have started here.
But we’re not gently bleeding. We are growing faster than Germany and about the same speed as France
Britain is not in a great position but neither is much of Europe, or, indeed, the world
98% of our problems have nothing to do with Brexit and many of them are down to chronic, self inflicted stupidity and a dysfunctional government and civil service - eg HS2
Oh for goodness sake even if we were roaring away successful and Europe was going off a cliff edge that doesn't mean Brexit is successful. You have to compare what you have gained to what you have lost, not compare us with another country and go 'look they are having problems too'. About the only thing you did get right there is it isn't all about Brexit. There are lots of other stuff that has an impact making your observation utterly pointless. You can only look at the gains and losses.
So the question is has the improvements in exporting and importing to the rest of the world greater than the loss in importing and exporting to Europe. To my mind the answer to that question is very very clear.
If not do the freedoms/restrictions of being outside of Europe in other areas outweigh the freedoms/restrictions of being in Europe. And the answer to that question in my mind is even clearer.
How many times can we repeat this argument? For me, Brexit is Brexit
Regaining sovereignty and proper democracy is really all that I cared about. That’s been done. So for me it is a success. I understand that you differ
What about Britain out of the EU makes it a "proper democracy"? A party that fails to win a majority of votes can still receive a majority of seats. An individual seat is still won by FPTP. Our Commons is still whipped and cajoled by the leadership, and very few votes fall outside of that. A political consensus that drips from the media and tufton street still holds sway. Indeed, the two major parties of government have very little policy differences between them - one of them offering a shit future administered poorly and the other one offering a shit future administered efficiently.
The biggest single win from Brexit has been preventing politicans doing things which they may or may not want to do and saying "EU rules, nothing we can do other than comply".
I'd vote for Brexit again tomorrow, regardless of economic cost, in order to prevent them getting that nasty little figleaf back (most of the time it was things they wanted to do, but the public wouldn't wear). A democracy where the top elected politicans can plausibly claim they are being made to do things the voters don't want by a higher power is not a proper democracy by any standard.
La Truss has been giving her speech today. She was the top elected politician, tried to do something, and was forced instead to do things that voters don't want by a higher power.
So Britain needs to leave the international money markets. Take Back Control of our lives by going back to simpler times where we simply took the things we wanted and sent a gunboat to shoot anyone who thought that was a bad idea.
The 'international money markets' have decided that Sunak's way is twice as shit as Truss's way.
In what way? I don't want to defend Sunak/Hunt too vehemently, but the pound is a fair bit stronger than it was with Truss/Kwarteng at the helm, and the Bank of England hasn't needed to come in with a multi-billion pound package to stave off an imminent collapse in pension funds. It's not a high bar, but they do appear to have cleared it.
My guess is that he is referring to interest rates or gilt yields. But this, amongst other things, completely ignores the international increases in both since Truss's unlamented premiership.
But what's changed internationally to cause the increases since?
Part of the problem is that the markets were horribly mispriced last year. They hadn't properly accounted for the global disruptions, inflationary pressures and the cost of energy bailouts etc
And Truss's announcements started the process of pulling back the curtain on that, which led to a shock, but the shock would have happened either way. The price rises were due either way.
Truss screwed up by lumping all her stuff in with what should have been standalone pieces, and in doing so she acted as a human shield. It was stupid politics, stupid media management, more than stupid economics.
I think that that is a slightly parochial way of looking at things.
What Truss did, that scared the markets, was dramatically increase spending, specifically on a ridiculously generous energy scheme, and decrease taxes at the same time without any explanation from the OBR as to how this was going to work out. An insolvency or run away inflation as we printed more money to pay the bills seemed likely scenarios and the market panicked. Hunt was able to calm them down again by cancelling the tax cuts, massively cutting back on the energy subsidy and getting the OBR to sign off on it.
Since then the international situation has deteriorated with the inflationary consequences of energy subsidy coming to bear forcing central banks to increase base rates very substantially and moving back into a more "normal" interest rate world. The first crisis was home made and down to Truss. The ongoing crisis is one we share with nearly all western nations to varying degrees.
The first and second crisis are the same crisis - the cost of the energy bailout.
Any PM would have needed to do some sort of energy bailout, its why every country did one and that cost has come to bear, yes.
Where Truss was stupid was mixing her own policies in with the bailout which meant the entire poison of the energy scheme got lambasted as being due to her incredibly tiny in comparison tax changes.
Its was beyond stupid politics, but economically some sort of energy bailout would have been required either way and the cost of that would have had an impact either way, which is what we've seen.
Yes, but she wrote a blank cheque and had literally no idea what it was going to be cashed for. Whilst cutting taxes. A medium sized country like the UK can't get away with that. Only the US can and maybe not for much longer.
She wrote a blank cheque, that's the problem, the markets would have reacted either way for that.
The idea that all would have been sunshine and roses if it weren't for some pretty minor tax changes that got rolled back (its worth noting the one big tax change, abolishing the NIC Surcharge, was kept) is pretty silly.
Politically she took all the flak because she exposed herself by going in like a rash two footed challenge in football . . . but the flak would have happened in the markets, and has happened in the market, either way.
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
As I said earlier joining the single market is the only way to change the EU, and anything else is cosmetic
And at the moment raising that issue is certain to rouse latent Brexit support from its slumber. Single Market is Freedom Of Movement. Single Market is putting all of those terrible Euroregulations back into British Law.
Personally, I'd be fine with that. I'd even be fine if we fully aligned indefinitely and waited for a monthly email from Brussels telling us what new stuff they've come up with for us. (The freedoms at a personal level seem worth it to me.) But it would send the right, and the press, dolally, and Starmer isn't going to touch the button marked "Pressing This Button Is Incredibly Risky". There are enough people who hate all that to give Rishi a liferaft he doesn't deserve.
It's going to be like I said in 2020.
The next thing we try, 2025ish, will be a TCA that realistically co-operates on trade. Vet agreements, standards marking, that sort of thing. It will help a bit, but no- not much. That looks like Starmer's plan. But he won't be PM forever.
Beyond that, it gets speculative, anything might happen, but I haven't seen anything to change my rough schedule.
Single Market will be 2030ish. We can probably chuck in some Union of Customs as well. The Brit deals aren't coming out with anything special, and we can leave CPTPP with six months notice.
And then, who knows? Maybe the UK will be fine tagging along with whatever Brussels says. A lot of it is boring technical stuff, and there is the possibility of being consulted. A bit. I don't think the UK political classes are going to be happy with that, which is why Rejoin might happen, but only under a new generation of politicians.
All a bit rubbish, because the UK is gently bleeding under the current arrangements. But I wouldn't have started here.
But we’re not gently bleeding. We are growing faster than Germany and about the same speed as France
Britain is not in a great position but neither is much of Europe, or, indeed, the world
98% of our problems have nothing to do with Brexit and many of them are down to chronic, self inflicted stupidity and a dysfunctional government and civil service - eg HS2
Oh for goodness sake even if we were roaring away successful and Europe was going off a cliff edge that doesn't mean Brexit is successful. You have to compare what you have gained to what you have lost, not compare us with another country and go 'look they are having problems too'. About the only thing you did get right there is it isn't all about Brexit. There are lots of other stuff that has an impact making your observation utterly pointless. You can only look at the gains and losses.
So the question is has the improvements in exporting and importing to the rest of the world greater than the loss in importing and exporting to Europe. To my mind the answer to that question is very very clear.
If not do the freedoms/restrictions of being outside of Europe in other areas outweigh the freedoms/restrictions of being in Europe. And the answer to that question in my mind is even clearer.
How many times can we repeat this argument? For me, Brexit is Brexit
Regaining sovereignty and proper democracy is really all that I cared about. That’s been done. So for me it is a success. I understand that you differ
What about Britain out of the EU makes it a "proper democracy"? A party that fails to win a majority of votes can still receive a majority of seats. An individual seat is still won by FPTP. Our Commons is still whipped and cajoled by the leadership, and very few votes fall outside of that. A political consensus that drips from the media and tufton street still holds sway. Indeed, the two major parties of government have very little policy differences between them - one of them offering a shit future administered poorly and the other one offering a shit future administered efficiently.
The biggest single win from Brexit has been preventing politicans doing things which they may or may not want to do and saying "EU rules, nothing we can do other than comply".
I'd vote for Brexit again tomorrow, regardless of economic cost, in order to prevent them getting that nasty little figleaf back (most of the time it was things they wanted to do, but the public wouldn't wear). A democracy where the top elected politicans can plausibly claim they are being made to do things the voters don't want by a higher power is not a proper democracy by any standard.
La Truss has been giving her speech today. She was the top elected politician, tried to do something, and was forced instead to do things that voters don't want by a higher power.
So Britain needs to leave the international money markets. Take Back Control of our lives by going back to simpler times where we simply took the things we wanted and sent a gunboat to shoot anyone who thought that was a bad idea.
The 'international money markets' have decided that Sunak's way is twice as shit as Truss's way.
In what way? I don't want to defend Sunak/Hunt too vehemently, but the pound is a fair bit stronger than it was with Truss/Kwarteng at the helm, and the Bank of England hasn't needed to come in with a multi-billion pound package to stave off an imminent collapse in pension funds. It's not a high bar, but they do appear to have cleared it.
My guess is that he is referring to interest rates or gilt yields. But this, amongst other things, completely ignores the international increases in both since Truss's unlamented premiership.
But what's changed internationally to cause the increases since?
Part of the problem is that the markets were horribly mispriced last year. They hadn't properly accounted for the global disruptions, inflationary pressures and the cost of energy bailouts etc
And Truss's announcements started the process of pulling back the curtain on that, which led to a shock, but the shock would have happened either way. The price rises were due either way.
Truss screwed up by lumping all her stuff in with what should have been standalone pieces, and in doing so she acted as a human shield. It was stupid politics, stupid media management, more than stupid economics.
I think that that is a slightly parochial way of looking at things.
What Truss did, that scared the markets, was dramatically increase spending, specifically on a ridiculously generous energy scheme, and decrease taxes at the same time without any explanation from the OBR as to how this was going to work out. An insolvency or run away inflation as we printed more money to pay the bills seemed likely scenarios and the market panicked. Hunt was able to calm them down again by cancelling the tax cuts, massively cutting back on the energy subsidy and getting the OBR to sign off on it.
Since then the international situation has deteriorated with the inflationary consequences of energy subsidy coming to bear forcing central banks to increase base rates very substantially and moving back into a more "normal" interest rate world. The first crisis was home made and down to Truss. The ongoing crisis is one we share with nearly all western nations to varying degrees.
It was also the seeming disconnect between monetary policy and fiscal policy. If the Bank of England had already started tightening then it might have landed differently.
The Bank, as usual, really didn't help matters and the perception that they were out of the decision making loop was a further source for concern. Interest rates should have been rising for the best part of a year before they were. We would probably have lower rates now had that been the case, as well as lower inflation.
People who've moved aren't registered yet is about as shocking as it raining in England.
People who haven't moved are registered is about as shocking as the sun rising in the East.
People need to register that they've moved address, many don't bother immediately, but before every election there's a surge of people registering in time to vote.
I myself moved late last year but only registered to vote days before the deadline for the local elections this year, because that prompted it. Never lost my vote though, despite for a few months being "registered at the wrong address".
It being an old problem does not mean that it is not a problem.
It is definitely undemocratic when the rules to register make it difficult for those who belong to a specific demographic (almost by definition). The the demographic group being disadvantaged here are those people who, as a group, move house frequently. The fact that you managed to "not lose your vote" does not mean that the majority were as proactive as you were.
People who've moved aren't registered yet is about as shocking as it raining in England.
People who haven't moved are registered is about as shocking as the sun rising in the East.
People need to register that they've moved address, many don't bother immediately, but before every election there's a surge of people registering in time to vote.
I myself moved late last year but only registered to vote days before the deadline for the local elections this year, because that prompted it. Never lost my vote though, despite for a few months being "registered at the wrong address".
It being an old problem does not mean that it is not a problem.
It is definitely undemocratic when the rules to register make it difficult for those who belong to a specific demographic (almost by definition). The the demographic group being disadvantaged here are those people who, as a group, move house frequently. The fact that you managed to "not lose your vote" does not mean that the majority were as proactive as you were.
The rules to register don't make it difficult though, it takes less than 5 minutes, involves no postage and can be done on your phone or computer easily.
That people haven't bothered is a different kettle of fish to it being difficult.
Every single election people are proactive and register. Anyone who doesn't, almost certainly has no intention to vote anyway.
More seriously, the Russians must know by now that they’re stuffed. Black Sea fleet on it’s way to being completely destroyed as a viable force, the entirety of their Soviet arsenal chewed up into pieces in the fields of Ukraine, along with the flower of both their infantry & cavalry. The only thing keeping them going is a stubborn refusal to admit the inevitable. Still, something might turn up for them I guess - a Trump 2024 victory perhaps? It seems hope is all they have left & hope is not a wining strategy.
On the other hand the great Ukrainian counter-offensive has been a terrifically expensive failure, chewing up tens of thousands of men to gain about 3 villages. Where is the oft-promised breakthrough? The severing of Russia’s land bridge to Crimea?
It’s not happening, is it? We are now in mid September and it all grinds on, pointlessly
Russia cannot win this war (without Trump) but nor, I fear, can Ukraine
They have a breakthrough in southern Ukraine. It’s painstaking work and doesn’t make for good TV so you judge it a failure
They don’t have a breakthrough. From today’s Guardian
“Earlier Maliar had issued a lengthy update on Telegram, claiming that Ukrainian forces have repelled Russian attacks in a number of areas, including in the Kupyansk, Bakhmut, and Marinka directions. Maliar also gave new figures for the amount of territory recaptured by Ukraine. She said 2 sq km had been captured around Bakhmut, and in the past week, and that 51 sq km had been recaptured there since the start of the counteroffensive“
51sq km. That’s about two London boroughs. Maybe 6km by 9km. At a cost of 10,000 men? 20,000? And it’s taken months
Face it, this is not working
They’ve also just sacked 6 defence ministers, which says something in itself
I'm not sure what you expect?
There's no magic way to win a war. You have to destroy the enemy army. Before you have done this they will be able to resist and hold ground.
I think there's decent evidence that Ukraine are inflicting greater losses then they are suffering, and so, if they are inflicting losses on Russia more quickly then Russia can replace those losses, they will eventually reach a point where Russia is unable to defend the current front line. But this will necessarily take time and it will look like not much progress is made while it plays out.
Meanwhile, for example, we can see that Ukraine is able to attack valuable Russians assets almost at will, whole Russia is unable to enforce it's blockade of Ukrainian ports.
Probably the wrong analogy, but in the first world war the British fought an epic battle on the Somme and then a year later another at Passchendaele, both often regarded as at best pyrrhic victories. Yet both were instrumental in the weakening and ultimate defeat of the Imperial German Army. The Somme was described as 'the muddy grave of the German Army' and resulted in the withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line in 1917. After Passchendaele a German general staff publication had "Germany had been brought near to certain destruction (sicheren Untergang) by the Flanders battle of 1917".
Yet after both battles, I suspect @Leon would have been calling them failures.
I cannot see the future, but I think the danger of Russia 'winning' in Ukraine is gone, and its now all about whether Russia can be ejected fully (and at what cost) or if Putin finally gets replaced. Regimes can fall very fast at the end.
It's not a terrible analogy, because it highlights that the enemy army has to be destroyed in order to defeat it, but there are key differences.
The most important is that Ukraine has an advantage with key weapons - drones, HIMARS, Storm Shadow, etc - which means they can destroy the Russian army with considerably less losses than that suffered by the British and French in WWI.
But another key difference is that the combined populations of France and Britain, and the British and French empires, vastly exceeded the population of the kaiser’s Germany. In brutal terms, the western powers could afford to lose more men than Berlin, in the end. And then the Americans joined in, tilting it even further
That is very much not the case here. The Russian population is 3x that of Ukraine
In a brutal war of attrition, this basic maths matters. I also dispute that Ukraine is losing fewer men now, than Russia. Ukraine is on the offensive, that is always more expensive in lives than defence
Ukraine haven't made many direct assaults of the kind that we saw in early June, where we saw damaged Leopard tanks. If they had we would be seeing the photos of it from the Russians. They've deliberately been fighting in a way to minimise casualties. It also sounds like the western kit might not be magic in terms of forcing a breakthrough, but does a great job on saving lives. The Ukrainian tank crews are walking away from most of Western armoured vehicles when they're damaged or destroyed.
So I think it's quite plausible that Ukrainian casualties are lower than Russian.
Also, number of soldiers dead is not likely to be the determinant of Russia reaching a breaking point. Running out of military equipment will come first. This is why Ukraine's success in the artillery war is so important.
Soviet doctrine for their military vehicles was to make as many of them as possible given their large population. As a result their prioritised production over things such as crew protection. This has carried on over into current Russian thinking. The crew of a Russian tank or armoured vehicle is very unlikely to survive. Whereas in the West we realised the need to protect valuable crews an d made smaller numbers of vehicles that prioritised crew safety. As I understand it most crews in knocked out western vehicles have survived.
Ukraine learnt very quickly from one early offensive in June that it couldn't just charge a load of Western tanks/IFVs at Russian defences. They have since been waging a war of attrition against Russia. It is slow but it does seem to be working. Russia has less and less gear even if it still does have lots of manpower. The gear that it has is of car worse quality than what it could use at the start of the war.
Even in manpower it is becoming a struggle for Russia. They are now manning their defence with elite offensive units. Why would they do this unless they had no other choice? Those units will not be used again for offensive operations.
Ukraine is also becoming more and more adapt with its long range weapons. The Black Sea is almost a no-go area now for Russian warships as has been seen over the last week.
It is a long process but I do not see many positives for Russia. It is bloody for Ukraine but things are slowly moving in their direction.
One positive for Russia is that they haven't lost yet, and it's possible that Europe and the US will talk themselves into giving up.
Apparently the favourite in the Slovak election has pledged to stop providing any support for Ukraine. People might scoff at Slovakia's size, but Ukraine has an important joint-venture with them that is delivering new self-propelled artillery, and they've been a firm supporter of Ukraine to this point.
You can't talk yourself into winning a war you are losing, but you can talk yourself into losing a war that you are winning - and I think that's what Leon (and others) are doing.
Believe it or not, I’m trying to be objective. As @Dura_Ace says, you can’t rely on the media to give you a full picture. Too much western media is pompom waving ra-ra Ukraine bullshit - echoed on PB. But the Russian media is even worse from the other side
So you have to weave your way through the minefield of misinformation to reach an informed guess - and it is only a guess - as to what is happening. And my guess is: stalemate
However I do see some hopeful signs for Ukraine. The death of Prigozhin and now, allegedly, Kadyrov - both close allies of Putin, bring assassination ever closer to Vlad himself. He must be paranoid as fuck
Hopefully someone will slot him, asafp
I disagree with your attempt at objective analysis for reasons that I've previously given. I'm not relying on the western media, and I look for sources that share bad news for Ukraine, and are cautious about wild claims of Ukrainian success.
I think your guess of a stalemate is a superficial conclusion that ignores the signs of degradation of the Russian military that are occurring. A degradation that makes a stalemate unlikely.
I find it strange that you would be making this point when early September may well go down as a crucial turning point in the war. We can now see that Russia cannot protect its ships at dock in Sevastopol, nor can it enforce a blockade of Ukrainian ports.
These are massive signs of the war moving in Ukraine's favour and that Russia's hold on Crimea is untenable (and also pointless - if they can't use Sevastopol as a base for their Black Sea Fleet then what good is it to them?)
People who've moved aren't registered yet is about as shocking as it raining in England.
People who haven't moved are registered is about as shocking as the sun rising in the East.
People need to register that they've moved address, many don't bother immediately, but before every election there's a surge of people registering in time to vote.
I myself moved late last year but only registered to vote days before the deadline for the local elections this year, because that prompted it. Never lost my vote though, despite for a few months being "registered at the wrong address".
It being an old problem does not mean that it is not a problem.
It is definitely undemocratic when the rules to register make it difficult for those who belong to a specific demographic (almost by definition). The the demographic group being disadvantaged here are those people who, as a group, move house frequently. The fact that you managed to "not lose your vote" does not mean that the majority were as proactive as you were.
The rules to register don't make it difficult though, it takes less than 5 minutes, involves no postage and can be done on your phone or computer easily.
That people haven't bothered is a different kettle of fish to it being difficult.
Every single election people are proactive and register. Anyone who doesn't, almost certainly has no intention to vote anyway.
There's nothing in the article remotely to justify the "up to 8m" claim.
Truss' complete disregard for the impact of her mini-budget, alongside the occasional person commenting that she wasn't given long enough to see if she was proven right, feels to me like the future of the Tory party is in the hands of Tufton Street. The consensus before she got in that she would be the change that was needed and the way many in right wing media have insulated her and have tried to help her with this rehabilitation tour is worrying to me.
People who've moved aren't registered yet is about as shocking as it raining in England.
People who haven't moved are registered is about as shocking as the sun rising in the East.
People need to register that they've moved address, many don't bother immediately, but before every election there's a surge of people registering in time to vote.
I myself moved late last year but only registered to vote days before the deadline for the local elections this year, because that prompted it. Never lost my vote though, despite for a few months being "registered at the wrong address".
It being an old problem does not mean that it is not a problem.
It is definitely undemocratic when the rules to register make it difficult for those who belong to a specific demographic (almost by definition). The the demographic group being disadvantaged here are those people who, as a group, move house frequently. The fact that you managed to "not lose your vote" does not mean that the majority were as proactive as you were.
The rules to register don't make it difficult though, it takes less than 5 minutes, involves no postage and can be done on your phone or computer easily.
That people haven't bothered is a different kettle of fish to it being difficult.
Every single election people are proactive and register. Anyone who doesn't, almost certainly has no intention to vote anyway.
The intention to vote isn't the same as the right to vote, is it?
Many on here think there will be a reduced turnout next time as those dilllusioned with all parties voice their mutual contempt by not bothering to vote or spoiling the ballot paper.
It should also be remembered the whole registration system was brought in, supposedly, to cure a problem which in fact didn't exist. The amount of electoral fraud is infinitesimal against the number of votes and it's less those turning up to vote rather than the postal vote system which is where most of the malpractice has been found. I think there's a case for tightening the postal voting system especially, unfortunately, among care home residents.
Other than that, the system works well and the personation problems famously recorded in Ulster - "vote early, vote often" - just aren't found either. I'm not a big fan of the ID requirement - again, no evidence the basic system is being defrauded or manipulated in any way. As Mrs Stodge points out, she now has to take her UK passport to vote because she has no other acceptable form of photo ID.
I hope both Labour and the LDs pledge to sweep all this nonsense away but with the caveat of stronger checks on postal and proxy voting.
Greg Hands whining about Labour giving votes to 16 and 17 year olds . Accusing them of vote rigging ! From the party who brought in new voter ID which was aimed at disenfranchising opposition voters .
If you can join the army , have sex and work why are you too young to vote ?
Was Rishi really a thing after Liz's victory? My recollection was that the British Right was proclaiming her, after decades of false dawns, as the final and authentic embodiment of all their hopes and dreams, and with 'the Anti-Growth Coalition' she had come up with a slogan that would bury Sir Keir an Labour alive. Rishi had completely sunk into nothingness.
He was completely invisible after Truss gaped his hole in the leadership contest. He only re-emerged from inside a Kinder Egg after The Men in Grey Tenas did for her.
Cummings called it very early on, describing her as "As close to properly mental to anyone I ever met in Wesminster."
That the Truss Premiership fell apart like a cheap suit in a matter of weeks is a matter of historical record.
As for why it fell apart, that's somewhere on the spectrum of "shadowy forces did it to Truss" to "Truss did it to herself". I incline towards the latter; the idea that Rishi (yes that Rishi) was a ruthless political operator for just long enough to stab Truss before returning to his normal state isn't really plausible. I accept that others disagree.
But it doesn't really matter. Politics is about perception at least as much as reality, and the national perception of Truss is "crazy lady who nearly bankrupted us". It doesn't matter if that's fair or true, it's already stuck.
Truss speaking in favour of tax cuts will probably move the dial towards people thinking tax rises are a good idea.
Truss' complete disregard for the impact of her mini-budget, alongside the occasional person commenting that she wasn't given long enough to see if she was proven right, feels to me like the future of the Tory party is in the hands of Tufton Street. The consensus before she got in that she would be the change that was needed and the way many in right wing media have insulated her and have tried to help her with this rehabilitation tour is worrying to me.
I think it's clear that she was on her way to clown school when somehow she found herself elected as an MP. Quite how she managed to progress from there is baffling. (I'd not even venture a guess)
Truss' complete disregard for the impact of her mini-budget, alongside the occasional person commenting that she wasn't given long enough to see if she was proven right, feels to me like the future of the Tory party is in the hands of Tufton Street. The consensus before she got in that she would be the change that was needed and the way many in right wing media have insulated her and have tried to help her with this rehabilitation tour is worrying to me.
I think it's clear that she was on her way to clown school when somehow she found herself elected as an MP. Quite how she managed to progress from there is baffling. (I'd not even venture a guess)
The backing of an alumnus from that same school, at a guess?
More seriously, the Russians must know by now that they’re stuffed. Black Sea fleet on it’s way to being completely destroyed as a viable force, the entirety of their Soviet arsenal chewed up into pieces in the fields of Ukraine, along with the flower of both their infantry & cavalry. The only thing keeping them going is a stubborn refusal to admit the inevitable. Still, something might turn up for them I guess - a Trump 2024 victory perhaps? It seems hope is all they have left & hope is not a wining strategy.
On the other hand the great Ukrainian counter-offensive has been a terrifically expensive failure, chewing up tens of thousands of men to gain about 3 villages. Where is the oft-promised breakthrough? The severing of Russia’s land bridge to Crimea?
It’s not happening, is it? We are now in mid September and it all grinds on, pointlessly
Russia cannot win this war (without Trump) but nor, I fear, can Ukraine
They have a breakthrough in southern Ukraine. It’s painstaking work and doesn’t make for good TV so you judge it a failure
They don’t have a breakthrough. From today’s Guardian
“Earlier Maliar had issued a lengthy update on Telegram, claiming that Ukrainian forces have repelled Russian attacks in a number of areas, including in the Kupyansk, Bakhmut, and Marinka directions. Maliar also gave new figures for the amount of territory recaptured by Ukraine. She said 2 sq km had been captured around Bakhmut, and in the past week, and that 51 sq km had been recaptured there since the start of the counteroffensive“
51sq km. That’s about two London boroughs. Maybe 6km by 9km. At a cost of 10,000 men? 20,000? And it’s taken months
Face it, this is not working
They’ve also just sacked 6 defence ministers, which says something in itself
I'm not sure what you expect?
There's no magic way to win a war. You have to destroy the enemy army. Before you have done this they will be able to resist and hold ground.
I think there's decent evidence that Ukraine are inflicting greater losses then they are suffering, and so, if they are inflicting losses on Russia more quickly then Russia can replace those losses, they will eventually reach a point where Russia is unable to defend the current front line. But this will necessarily take time and it will look like not much progress is made while it plays out.
Meanwhile, for example, we can see that Ukraine is able to attack valuable Russians assets almost at will, whole Russia is unable to enforce it's blockade of Ukrainian ports.
Probably the wrong analogy, but in the first world war the British fought an epic battle on the Somme and then a year later another at Passchendaele, both often regarded as at best pyrrhic victories. Yet both were instrumental in the weakening and ultimate defeat of the Imperial German Army. The Somme was described as 'the muddy grave of the German Army' and resulted in the withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line in 1917. After Passchendaele a German general staff publication had "Germany had been brought near to certain destruction (sicheren Untergang) by the Flanders battle of 1917".
Yet after both battles, I suspect @Leon would have been calling them failures.
I cannot see the future, but I think the danger of Russia 'winning' in Ukraine is gone, and its now all about whether Russia can be ejected fully (and at what cost) or if Putin finally gets replaced. Regimes can fall very fast at the end.
It's not a terrible analogy, because it highlights that the enemy army has to be destroyed in order to defeat it, but there are key differences.
The most important is that Ukraine has an advantage with key weapons - drones, HIMARS, Storm Shadow, etc - which means they can destroy the Russian army with considerably less losses than that suffered by the British and French in WWI.
But another key difference is that the combined populations of France and Britain, and the British and French empires, vastly exceeded the population of the kaiser’s Germany. In brutal terms, the western powers could afford to lose more men than Berlin, in the end. And then the Americans joined in, tilting it even further
That is very much not the case here. The Russian population is 3x that of Ukraine
In a brutal war of attrition, this basic maths matters. I also dispute that Ukraine is losing fewer men now, than Russia. Ukraine is on the offensive, that is always more expensive in lives than defence
Ukraine haven't made many direct assaults of the kind that we saw in early June, where we saw damaged Leopard tanks. If they had we would be seeing the photos of it from the Russians. They've deliberately been fighting in a way to minimise casualties. It also sounds like the western kit might not be magic in terms of forcing a breakthrough, but does a great job on saving lives. The Ukrainian tank crews are walking away from most of Western armoured vehicles when they're damaged or destroyed.
So I think it's quite plausible that Ukrainian casualties are lower than Russian.
Also, number of soldiers dead is not likely to be the determinant of Russia reaching a breaking point. Running out of military equipment will come first. This is why Ukraine's success in the artillery war is so important.
Soviet doctrine for their military vehicles was to make as many of them as possible given their large population. As a result their prioritised production over things such as crew protection. This has carried on over into current Russian thinking. The crew of a Russian tank or armoured vehicle is very unlikely to survive. Whereas in the West we realised the need to protect valuable crews an d made smaller numbers of vehicles that prioritised crew safety. As I understand it most crews in knocked out western vehicles have survived.
Ukraine learnt very quickly from one early offensive in June that it couldn't just charge a load of Western tanks/IFVs at Russian defences. They have since been waging a war of attrition against Russia. It is slow but it does seem to be working. Russia has less and less gear even if it still does have lots of manpower. The gear that it has is of car worse quality than what it could use at the start of the war.
Even in manpower it is becoming a struggle for Russia. They are now manning their defence with elite offensive units. Why would they do this unless they had no other choice? Those units will not be used again for offensive operations.
Ukraine is also becoming more and more adapt with its long range weapons. The Black Sea is almost a no-go area now for Russian warships as has been seen over the last week.
It is a long process but I do not see many positives for Russia. It is bloody for Ukraine but things are slowly moving in their direction.
One positive for Russia is that they haven't lost yet, and it's possible that Europe and the US will talk themselves into giving up.
Apparently the favourite in the Slovak election has pledged to stop providing any support for Ukraine. People might scoff at Slovakia's size, but Ukraine has an important joint-venture with them that is delivering new self-propelled artillery, and they've been a firm supporter of Ukraine to this point.
You can't talk yourself into winning a war you are losing, but you can talk yourself into losing a war that you are winning - and I think that's what Leon (and others) are doing.
Believe it or not, I’m trying to be objective. As @Dura_Ace says, you can’t rely on the media to give you a full picture. Too much western media is pompom waving ra-ra Ukraine bullshit - echoed on PB. But the Russian media is even worse from the other side
So you have to weave your way through the minefield of misinformation to reach an informed guess - and it is only a guess - as to what is happening. And my guess is: stalemate
However I do see some hopeful signs for Ukraine. The death of Prigozhin and now, allegedly, Kadyrov - both close allies of Putin, bring assassination ever closer to Vlad himself. He must be paranoid as fuck
Hopefully someone will slot him, asafp
I disagree with your attempt at objective analysis for reasons that I've previously given. I'm not relying on the western media, and I look for sources that share bad news for Ukraine, and are cautious about wild claims of Ukrainian success.
I think your guess of a stalemate is a superficial conclusion that ignores the signs of degradation of the Russian military that are occurring. A degradation that makes a stalemate unlikely.
I find it strange that you would be making this point when early September may well go down as a crucial turning point in the war. We can now see that Russia cannot protect its ships at dock in Sevastopol, nor can it enforce a blockade of Ukrainian ports.
These are massive signs of the war moving in Ukraine's favour and that Russia's hold on Crimea is untenable (and also pointless - if they can't use Sevastopol as a base for their Black Sea Fleet then what good is it to them?)
If Leondamus is predicting stalemate, some sort of breakthrough or other dramatic development must surely be in the offing?
People who've moved aren't registered yet is about as shocking as it raining in England.
People who haven't moved are registered is about as shocking as the sun rising in the East.
People need to register that they've moved address, many don't bother immediately, but before every election there's a surge of people registering in time to vote.
I myself moved late last year but only registered to vote days before the deadline for the local elections this year, because that prompted it. Never lost my vote though, despite for a few months being "registered at the wrong address".
It being an old problem does not mean that it is not a problem.
It is definitely undemocratic when the rules to register make it difficult for those who belong to a specific demographic (almost by definition). The the demographic group being disadvantaged here are those people who, as a group, move house frequently. The fact that you managed to "not lose your vote" does not mean that the majority were as proactive as you were.
The rules to register don't make it difficult though, it takes less than 5 minutes, involves no postage and can be done on your phone or computer easily.
That people haven't bothered is a different kettle of fish to it being difficult.
Every single election people are proactive and register. Anyone who doesn't, almost certainly has no intention to vote anyway.
The intention to vote isn't the same as the right to vote, is it?
Many on here think there will be a reduced turnout next time as those dilllusioned with all parties voice their mutual contempt by not bothering to vote or spoiling the ballot paper.
It should also be remembered the whole registration system was brought in, supposedly, to cure a problem which in fact didn't exist. The amount of electoral fraud is infinitesimal against the number of votes and it's less those turning up to vote rather than the postal vote system which is where most of the malpractice has been found. I think there's a case for tightening the postal voting system especially, unfortunately, among care home residents.
Other than that, the system works well and the personation problems famously recorded in Ulster - "vote early, vote often" - just aren't found either. I'm not a big fan of the ID requirement - again, no evidence the basic system is being defrauded or manipulated in any way. As Mrs Stodge points out, she now has to take her UK passport to vote because she has no other acceptable form of photo ID.
I hope both Labour and the LDs pledge to sweep all this nonsense away but with the caveat of stronger checks on postal and proxy voting.
And it distorts the constituency boundaries. Labour should be all for automatic enrolment, votes for 16+ and removing postal voting. Revenge.
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
As I said earlier joining the single market is the only way to change the EU, and anything else is cosmetic
And at the moment raising that issue is certain to rouse latent Brexit support from its slumber. Single Market is Freedom Of Movement. Single Market is putting all of those terrible Euroregulations back into British Law.
Personally, I'd be fine with that. I'd even be fine if we fully aligned indefinitely and waited for a monthly email from Brussels telling us what new stuff they've come up with for us. (The freedoms at a personal level seem worth it to me.) But it would send the right, and the press, dolally, and Starmer isn't going to touch the button marked "Pressing This Button Is Incredibly Risky". There are enough people who hate all that to give Rishi a liferaft he doesn't deserve.
It's going to be like I said in 2020.
The next thing we try, 2025ish, will be a TCA that realistically co-operates on trade. Vet agreements, standards marking, that sort of thing. It will help a bit, but no- not much. That looks like Starmer's plan. But he won't be PM forever.
Beyond that, it gets speculative, anything might happen, but I haven't seen anything to change my rough schedule.
Single Market will be 2030ish. We can probably chuck in some Union of Customs as well. The Brit deals aren't coming out with anything special, and we can leave CPTPP with six months notice.
And then, who knows? Maybe the UK will be fine tagging along with whatever Brussels says. A lot of it is boring technical stuff, and there is the possibility of being consulted. A bit. I don't think the UK political classes are going to be happy with that, which is why Rejoin might happen, but only under a new generation of politicians.
All a bit rubbish, because the UK is gently bleeding under the current arrangements. But I wouldn't have started here.
It will certainly take Labour not only winning the next general election and winning back most of the red wall seats but having a clear poll lead for re election to risk going back into the single market and restoring free movement again
You seem to have this strange inability to recognise opinion changes, and so does that in the red wall as they look like endorsing Starmer
The one issue that may well come into play next year is the increasing crisis in the Mediterranean and the present EU impasse on how to deal with it
The UK will not be involved in these discussions, but if the migrants keep coming and in increasing numbers as is likely, then a real immigration crisis will engulf the whole of Europe with untold consequences
Greg Hands whining about Labour giving votes to 16 and 17 year olds . Accusing them of vote rigging ! From the party who brought in new voter ID which was aimed at disenfranchising opposition voters .
If you can join the army , have sex and work why are you too young to vote ?
Strange that there is so much horror about the BBC getting a car for Russell Brand’s 16yo girlfriend really
People who've moved aren't registered yet is about as shocking as it raining in England.
People who haven't moved are registered is about as shocking as the sun rising in the East.
People need to register that they've moved address, many don't bother immediately, but before every election there's a surge of people registering in time to vote.
I myself moved late last year but only registered to vote days before the deadline for the local elections this year, because that prompted it. Never lost my vote though, despite for a few months being "registered at the wrong address".
It being an old problem does not mean that it is not a problem.
It is definitely undemocratic when the rules to register make it difficult for those who belong to a specific demographic (almost by definition). The the demographic group being disadvantaged here are those people who, as a group, move house frequently. The fact that you managed to "not lose your vote" does not mean that the majority were as proactive as you were.
The rules to register don't make it difficult though, it takes less than 5 minutes, involves no postage and can be done on your phone or computer easily.
That people haven't bothered is a different kettle of fish to it being difficult.
Every single election people are proactive and register. Anyone who doesn't, almost certainly has no intention to vote anyway.
There's nothing in the article remotely to justify the "up to 8m" claim.
Next?
Yes the fact that millions don't want to bother is not in the article, which is why I brought it up.
Unless you go down the Australian route of making voting mandatory and making it against the law anyone who doesn't register and issuing them fines for not doing so, then there will be millions of people who just don't bother to register immediately, if ever.
And this isn't a change due to individual registration, it was just as much an issue under the old system too.
People need to bother. It takes less than five minutes to do so, and couldn't be easier, but if they choose not to bother then that's their choice.
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
There are some small changes that shouldn’t be too controversial and the EU would likely agree with . A large scale re-negotiation I agree is out of the question.
Ergo, one way or another, Starmer is lying. Not for the first time
He said he’d like to re-write the deal . We don’t know what if any changes are possible until we get to that point . Not sure it’s fair to accuse him of lying . The EU has a lot more goodwill towards Labour than the handmaidens of Brexit.
If you rule out SM/CU then the golden goose was really Horizon and Sunak has already plucked it. It may be possible to have more trusted trader schemes etc but that will make very little difference to 99.9% of the population.
Starmer made remarks about ‘getting a better EU deal for my kids’ and to me that means, probably, restoring some kind of Free Movement
I do wonder if he will go for it
Some sort of freedom of movement might be possible. The reality is that this exists already. I was doing a trial recently where one of the charges was attempting to pervert the course of justice. The accused was an Algerian but had been living here pretending to have been French (using false documents) and pretending to be covered by the transitional provisions applicable at the time of Brexit. Millions of people were granted such rights with very little inquiry and it does not take a lot of imagination to conclude that a fair number of these will have been for those wanting to sell a package of documentation to the likes of that Algerian.
I largely agree. I never had issues with Free Movement and it is now clear - as has been said on here - that neither party has any intention (or ability?) to really tackle mass immigration
So it is arguable we might as well get the benefits of the Single Market - perhaps
Pretty soon all the parties will be doing things to tackle mass immigration.
Not while the parties are convinced we need immigration to fill low-skilled jobs workshy Brits refuse, to do highly-skilled jobs like doctors and nurses that we don't train enough of and to counter the demographic timebomb. Something something Japan.
Truly back to 2015
Perhaps. But I await someone to propose an alternative: 1 Too many Brits are workshy. We have an attitude problem as a workforce compared to so many from eastern Europe and elsewhere. Despite a positive push of people out of the UK after Brexit, Brits haven't filled these jobs because they don't want them and never did. 2 Where we need skilled workers, we don't want to invest in training them. Things like the nursing bursary being cut are wholly counter-productive. "we can't afford it" ignores the costs of not having it, as usual. 3 I get repeatedly assured by PB Brexiteers that the likes of fruit farms should automate. Except that they can't because they don't have the money and the industry is financially a basket case. We have scrapped the hated CAP and replaced it with nothing. Farmers hated being told what to do for the money, voted to leave, and now have all the freedom but no actual money
Alternative: Pay people more.
If people are paid more then they will apply to do those jobs they don't want to do at shit wages (1).
If people are paid more and treated professionally, they'll get engaged with training (2).
If there's no money for training or investment then the businesses that are failing should go bust and someone else should be able to buy the land for a song and invest in productivity, whether it be investment in automation or investment in training professionals paid a decent salary.
If you're unproductive, you have no divine right for the government to solve your problems for you. That's a "you" problem.
I absolutely agree with this for the private sector.
For nursing it doesn't work though. You can't just say "If there's no money for training or investment then" health providers" should go bust.
The problem comes when we consider the food industry as a whole, which absolutely is necessary. If there is not enough food, people start to take things into their own hands. There seems to be a lot of weight heaped onto the assumption "and someone else should be able to buy the land for a song and invest in productivity, whether it be investment in automation or investment in training professionals paid a decent salary."
The public sector should be allowed FOM if they have gaps to fill. It’s the private sector’s exploitation of it that caused the public to back Brexit
More seriously, the Russians must know by now that they’re stuffed. Black Sea fleet on it’s way to being completely destroyed as a viable force, the entirety of their Soviet arsenal chewed up into pieces in the fields of Ukraine, along with the flower of both their infantry & cavalry. The only thing keeping them going is a stubborn refusal to admit the inevitable. Still, something might turn up for them I guess - a Trump 2024 victory perhaps? It seems hope is all they have left & hope is not a wining strategy.
On the other hand the great Ukrainian counter-offensive has been a terrifically expensive failure, chewing up tens of thousands of men to gain about 3 villages. Where is the oft-promised breakthrough? The severing of Russia’s land bridge to Crimea?
It’s not happening, is it? We are now in mid September and it all grinds on, pointlessly
Russia cannot win this war (without Trump) but nor, I fear, can Ukraine
They have a breakthrough in southern Ukraine. It’s painstaking work and doesn’t make for good TV so you judge it a failure
They don’t have a breakthrough. From today’s Guardian
“Earlier Maliar had issued a lengthy update on Telegram, claiming that Ukrainian forces have repelled Russian attacks in a number of areas, including in the Kupyansk, Bakhmut, and Marinka directions. Maliar also gave new figures for the amount of territory recaptured by Ukraine. She said 2 sq km had been captured around Bakhmut, and in the past week, and that 51 sq km had been recaptured there since the start of the counteroffensive“
51sq km. That’s about two London boroughs. Maybe 6km by 9km. At a cost of 10,000 men? 20,000? And it’s taken months
Face it, this is not working
They’ve also just sacked 6 defence ministers, which says something in itself
I'm not sure what you expect?
There's no magic way to win a war. You have to destroy the enemy army. Before you have done this they will be able to resist and hold ground.
I think there's decent evidence that Ukraine are inflicting greater losses then they are suffering, and so, if they are inflicting losses on Russia more quickly then Russia can replace those losses, they will eventually reach a point where Russia is unable to defend the current front line. But this will necessarily take time and it will look like not much progress is made while it plays out.
Meanwhile, for example, we can see that Ukraine is able to attack valuable Russians assets almost at will, whole Russia is unable to enforce it's blockade of Ukrainian ports.
Probably the wrong analogy, but in the first world war the British fought an epic battle on the Somme and then a year later another at Passchendaele, both often regarded as at best pyrrhic victories. Yet both were instrumental in the weakening and ultimate defeat of the Imperial German Army. The Somme was described as 'the muddy grave of the German Army' and resulted in the withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line in 1917. After Passchendaele a German general staff publication had "Germany had been brought near to certain destruction (sicheren Untergang) by the Flanders battle of 1917".
Yet after both battles, I suspect @Leon would have been calling them failures.
I cannot see the future, but I think the danger of Russia 'winning' in Ukraine is gone, and its now all about whether Russia can be ejected fully (and at what cost) or if Putin finally gets replaced. Regimes can fall very fast at the end.
It's not a terrible analogy, because it highlights that the enemy army has to be destroyed in order to defeat it, but there are key differences.
The most important is that Ukraine has an advantage with key weapons - drones, HIMARS, Storm Shadow, etc - which means they can destroy the Russian army with considerably less losses than that suffered by the British and French in WWI.
But another key difference is that the combined populations of France and Britain, and the British and French empires, vastly exceeded the population of the kaiser’s Germany. In brutal terms, the western powers could afford to lose more men than Berlin, in the end. And then the Americans joined in, tilting it even further
That is very much not the case here. The Russian population is 3x that of Ukraine
In a brutal war of attrition, this basic maths matters. I also dispute that Ukraine is losing fewer men now, than Russia. Ukraine is on the offensive, that is always more expensive in lives than defence
Ukraine haven't made many direct assaults of the kind that we saw in early June, where we saw damaged Leopard tanks. If they had we would be seeing the photos of it from the Russians. They've deliberately been fighting in a way to minimise casualties. It also sounds like the western kit might not be magic in terms of forcing a breakthrough, but does a great job on saving lives. The Ukrainian tank crews are walking away from most of Western armoured vehicles when they're damaged or destroyed.
So I think it's quite plausible that Ukrainian casualties are lower than Russian.
Also, number of soldiers dead is not likely to be the determinant of Russia reaching a breaking point. Running out of military equipment will come first. This is why Ukraine's success in the artillery war is so important.
Soviet doctrine for their military vehicles was to make as many of them as possible given their large population. As a result their prioritised production over things such as crew protection. This has carried on over into current Russian thinking. The crew of a Russian tank or armoured vehicle is very unlikely to survive. Whereas in the West we realised the need to protect valuable crews an d made smaller numbers of vehicles that prioritised crew safety. As I understand it most crews in knocked out western vehicles have survived.
Ukraine learnt very quickly from one early offensive in June that it couldn't just charge a load of Western tanks/IFVs at Russian defences. They have since been waging a war of attrition against Russia. It is slow but it does seem to be working. Russia has less and less gear even if it still does have lots of manpower. The gear that it has is of car worse quality than what it could use at the start of the war.
Even in manpower it is becoming a struggle for Russia. They are now manning their defence with elite offensive units. Why would they do this unless they had no other choice? Those units will not be used again for offensive operations.
Ukraine is also becoming more and more adapt with its long range weapons. The Black Sea is almost a no-go area now for Russian warships as has been seen over the last week.
It is a long process but I do not see many positives for Russia. It is bloody for Ukraine but things are slowly moving in their direction.
One positive for Russia is that they haven't lost yet, and it's possible that Europe and the US will talk themselves into giving up.
Apparently the favourite in the Slovak election has pledged to stop providing any support for Ukraine. People might scoff at Slovakia's size, but Ukraine has an important joint-venture with them that is delivering new self-propelled artillery, and they've been a firm supporter of Ukraine to this point.
You can't talk yourself into winning a war you are losing, but you can talk yourself into losing a war that you are winning - and I think that's what Leon (and others) are doing.
Believe it or not, I’m trying to be objective. As @Dura_Ace says, you can’t rely on the media to give you a full picture. Too much western media is pompom waving ra-ra Ukraine bullshit - echoed on PB. But the Russian media is even worse from the other side
So you have to weave your way through the minefield of misinformation to reach an informed guess - and it is only a guess - as to what is happening. And my guess is: stalemate
However I do see some hopeful signs for Ukraine. The death of Prigozhin and now, allegedly, Kadyrov - both close allies of Putin, bring assassination ever closer to Vlad himself. He must be paranoid as fuck
Hopefully someone will slot him, asafp
I disagree with your attempt at objective analysis for reasons that I've previously given. I'm not relying on the western media, and I look for sources that share bad news for Ukraine, and are cautious about wild claims of Ukrainian success.
I think your guess of a stalemate is a superficial conclusion that ignores the signs of degradation of the Russian military that are occurring. A degradation that makes a stalemate unlikely.
I find it strange that you would be making this point when early September may well go down as a crucial turning point in the war. We can now see that Russia cannot protect its ships at dock in Sevastopol, nor can it enforce a blockade of Ukrainian ports.
These are massive signs of the war moving in Ukraine's favour and that Russia's hold on Crimea is untenable (and also pointless - if they can't use Sevastopol as a base for their Black Sea Fleet then what good is it to them?)
Considering that the Russians thought the SMO would be over in weeks (is the dress uniforms story true?) the fact that we ae now 18 months in suggests all is not going to plan for the Russians. I am reminded of the dilemna of the South in the US civil war - they needed to win quickly as the North's superiority (financial, industrial capacity etc) would overwhelm them in the end, as it did. Ukraine is being armed by the free world (perhaps not with the latest kit, but good enough). Trump aside, there isn't really an appetite for ending the supply.
Greg Hands whining about Labour giving votes to 16 and 17 year olds . Accusing them of vote rigging ! From the party who brought in new voter ID which was aimed at disenfranchising opposition voters .
If you can join the army , have sex and work why are you too young to vote ?
Strange that there is so much horror about the BBC getting a car for Russell Brand’s 16yo girlfriend really
People might think it’s pervy dating a 16 year old but the law is the law . I find it strange that any woman would find Brand attractive .
People who've moved aren't registered yet is about as shocking as it raining in England.
People who haven't moved are registered is about as shocking as the sun rising in the East.
People need to register that they've moved address, many don't bother immediately, but before every election there's a surge of people registering in time to vote.
I myself moved late last year but only registered to vote days before the deadline for the local elections this year, because that prompted it. Never lost my vote though, despite for a few months being "registered at the wrong address".
It being an old problem does not mean that it is not a problem.
It is definitely undemocratic when the rules to register make it difficult for those who belong to a specific demographic (almost by definition). The the demographic group being disadvantaged here are those people who, as a group, move house frequently. The fact that you managed to "not lose your vote" does not mean that the majority were as proactive as you were.
The rules to register don't make it difficult though, it takes less than 5 minutes, involves no postage and can be done on your phone or computer easily.
That people haven't bothered is a different kettle of fish to it being difficult.
Every single election people are proactive and register. Anyone who doesn't, almost certainly has no intention to vote anyway.
In which case you should have been arguing that the system is not "outdated". When I lived in the UK the system certainly was outdated, needing to apply by post and if you hadn't registered a new address by the end of the year, you weren't allowed to vote "at your new address" for the elections in the year. Bad luck if you moved in January and there was a June election,
If you can now update your voters register details online/with a smartphone, that is a big improvement. Is the register still fixed for the calendar year?
"Every single election people are proactive and register." This is not true in the UK. If you are registered and do not move your details are rolled forward. So it is not "every single election" it is "every single house move".
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
As I said earlier joining the single market is the only way to change the EU, and anything else is cosmetic
And at the moment raising that issue is certain to rouse latent Brexit support from its slumber. Single Market is Freedom Of Movement. Single Market is putting all of those terrible Euroregulations back into British Law.
Personally, I'd be fine with that. I'd even be fine if we fully aligned indefinitely and waited for a monthly email from Brussels telling us what new stuff they've come up with for us. (The freedoms at a personal level seem worth it to me.) But it would send the right, and the press, dolally, and Starmer isn't going to touch the button marked "Pressing This Button Is Incredibly Risky". There are enough people who hate all that to give Rishi a liferaft he doesn't deserve.
It's going to be like I said in 2020.
The next thing we try, 2025ish, will be a TCA that realistically co-operates on trade. Vet agreements, standards marking, that sort of thing. It will help a bit, but no- not much. That looks like Starmer's plan. But he won't be PM forever.
Beyond that, it gets speculative, anything might happen, but I haven't seen anything to change my rough schedule.
Single Market will be 2030ish. We can probably chuck in some Union of Customs as well. The Brit deals aren't coming out with anything special, and we can leave CPTPP with six months notice.
And then, who knows? Maybe the UK will be fine tagging along with whatever Brussels says. A lot of it is boring technical stuff, and there is the possibility of being consulted. A bit. I don't think the UK political classes are going to be happy with that, which is why Rejoin might happen, but only under a new generation of politicians.
All a bit rubbish, because the UK is gently bleeding under the current arrangements. But I wouldn't have started here.
But we’re not gently bleeding. We are growing faster than Germany and about the same speed as France
Britain is not in a great position but neither is much of Europe, or, indeed, the world
98% of our problems have nothing to do with Brexit and many of them are down to chronic, self inflicted stupidity and a dysfunctional government and civil service - eg HS2
Oh for goodness sake even if we were roaring away successful and Europe was going off a cliff edge that doesn't mean Brexit is successful. You have to compare what you have gained to what you have lost, not compare us with another country and go 'look they are having problems too'. About the only thing you did get right there is it isn't all about Brexit. There are lots of other stuff that has an impact making your observation utterly pointless. You can only look at the gains and losses.
So the question is has the improvements in exporting and importing to the rest of the world greater than the loss in importing and exporting to Europe. To my mind the answer to that question is very very clear.
If not do the freedoms/restrictions of being outside of Europe in other areas outweigh the freedoms/restrictions of being in Europe. And the answer to that question in my mind is even clearer.
How many times can we repeat this argument? For me, Brexit is Brexit
Regaining sovereignty and proper democracy is really all that I cared about. That’s been done. So for me it is a success. I understand that you differ
What about Britain out of the EU makes it a "proper democracy"? A party that fails to win a majority of votes can still receive a majority of seats. An individual seat is still won by FPTP. Our Commons is still whipped and cajoled by the leadership, and very few votes fall outside of that. A political consensus that drips from the media and tufton street still holds sway. Indeed, the two major parties of government have very little policy differences between them - one of them offering a shit future administered poorly and the other one offering a shit future administered efficiently.
The biggest single win from Brexit has been preventing politicans doing things which they may or may not want to do and saying "EU rules, nothing we can do other than comply".
I'd vote for Brexit again tomorrow, regardless of economic cost, in order to prevent them getting that nasty little figleaf back (most of the time it was things they wanted to do, but the public wouldn't wear). A democracy where the top elected politicans can plausibly claim they are being made to do things the voters don't want by a higher power is not a proper democracy by any standard.
So the reason to leave the EU that helps safeguard democracy, in your view, is that instead of blaming Brussels (falsely) for things, the government now have to take responsibility? How's that working out?
Considering that a huge amount of the blaming Brussels narrative was created as part of the lengthy campaign to get out of the EU, as were many of the stories and positions mischaracterising EU rules and such, you're claiming that we have saved democracy from the very people who threatened it by giving them what they wanted? Grand.
Greg Hands whining about Labour giving votes to 16 and 17 year olds . Accusing them of vote rigging ! From the party who brought in new voter ID which was aimed at disenfranchising opposition voters .
If you can join the army , have sex and work why are you too young to vote ?
Strange that there is so much horror about the BBC getting a car for Russell Brand’s 16yo girlfriend really
People might think it’s pervy dating a 16 year old but the law is the law . I find it strange that any woman would find Brand attractive .
Bit of an inopportune day for Lucy Powell to be going on about it being legal for 16yo to have sex, when the headlines are about the grooming of a 16yo.
Yes, I can’t stand him, but a lot of women seem(ed) to be desperate to have sex with him.
Hearing on the grapevine (a friend who works on the levelling up brief) that whilst she does suffer from migraines, the main reason she's leaving is to go join the right wing punditry circuit. So maybe she'll be a regular columnist or GB news presenter or some such...
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
As I said earlier joining the single market is the only way to change the EU, and anything else is cosmetic
And at the moment raising that issue is certain to rouse latent Brexit support from its slumber. Single Market is Freedom Of Movement. Single Market is putting all of those terrible Euroregulations back into British Law.
Personally, I'd be fine with that. I'd even be fine if we fully aligned indefinitely and waited for a monthly email from Brussels telling us what new stuff they've come up with for us. (The freedoms at a personal level seem worth it to me.) But it would send the right, and the press, dolally, and Starmer isn't going to touch the button marked "Pressing This Button Is Incredibly Risky". There are enough people who hate all that to give Rishi a liferaft he doesn't deserve.
It's going to be like I said in 2020.
The next thing we try, 2025ish, will be a TCA that realistically co-operates on trade. Vet agreements, standards marking, that sort of thing. It will help a bit, but no- not much. That looks like Starmer's plan. But he won't be PM forever.
Beyond that, it gets speculative, anything might happen, but I haven't seen anything to change my rough schedule.
Single Market will be 2030ish. We can probably chuck in some Union of Customs as well. The Brit deals aren't coming out with anything special, and we can leave CPTPP with six months notice.
And then, who knows? Maybe the UK will be fine tagging along with whatever Brussels says. A lot of it is boring technical stuff, and there is the possibility of being consulted. A bit. I don't think the UK political classes are going to be happy with that, which is why Rejoin might happen, but only under a new generation of politicians.
All a bit rubbish, because the UK is gently bleeding under the current arrangements. But I wouldn't have started here.
But we’re not gently bleeding. We are growing faster than Germany and about the same speed as France
Britain is not in a great position but neither is much of Europe, or, indeed, the world
98% of our problems have nothing to do with Brexit and many of them are down to chronic, self inflicted stupidity and a dysfunctional government and civil service - eg HS2
Oh for goodness sake even if we were roaring away successful and Europe was going off a cliff edge that doesn't mean Brexit is successful. You have to compare what you have gained to what you have lost, not compare us with another country and go 'look they are having problems too'. About the only thing you did get right there is it isn't all about Brexit. There are lots of other stuff that has an impact making your observation utterly pointless. You can only look at the gains and losses.
So the question is has the improvements in exporting and importing to the rest of the world greater than the loss in importing and exporting to Europe. To my mind the answer to that question is very very clear.
If not do the freedoms/restrictions of being outside of Europe in other areas outweigh the freedoms/restrictions of being in Europe. And the answer to that question in my mind is even clearer.
How many times can we repeat this argument? For me, Brexit is Brexit
Regaining sovereignty and proper democracy is really all that I cared about. That’s been done. So for me it is a success. I understand that you differ
What about Britain out of the EU makes it a "proper democracy"? A party that fails to win a majority of votes can still receive a majority of seats. An individual seat is still won by FPTP. Our Commons is still whipped and cajoled by the leadership, and very few votes fall outside of that. A political consensus that drips from the media and tufton street still holds sway. Indeed, the two major parties of government have very little policy differences between them - one of them offering a shit future administered poorly and the other one offering a shit future administered efficiently.
The biggest single win from Brexit has been preventing politicans doing things which they may or may not want to do and saying "EU rules, nothing we can do other than comply".
I'd vote for Brexit again tomorrow, regardless of economic cost, in order to prevent them getting that nasty little figleaf back (most of the time it was things they wanted to do, but the public wouldn't wear). A democracy where the top elected politicans can plausibly claim they are being made to do things the voters don't want by a higher power is not a proper democracy by any standard.
So the reason to leave the EU that helps safeguard democracy, in your view, is that instead of blaming Brussels (falsely) for things, the government now have to take responsibility? How's that working out?
Considering that a huge amount of the blaming Brussels narrative was created as part of the lengthy campaign to get out of the EU, as were many of the stories and positions mischaracterising EU rules and such, you're claiming that we have saved democracy from the very people who threatened it by giving them what they wanted? Grand.
Trouble is we seem to have swapped the "its all Brussels's fault" for "Its all because of Brexit".
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
There are some small changes that shouldn’t be too controversial and the EU would likely agree with . A large scale re-negotiation I agree is out of the question.
Ergo, one way or another, Starmer is lying. Not for the first time
He said he’d like to re-write the deal . We don’t know what if any changes are possible until we get to that point . Not sure it’s fair to accuse him of lying . The EU has a lot more goodwill towards Labour than the handmaidens of Brexit.
If you rule out SM/CU then the golden goose was really Horizon and Sunak has already plucked it. It may be possible to have more trusted trader schemes etc but that will make very little difference to 99.9% of the population.
Starmer made remarks about ‘getting a better EU deal for my kids’ and to me that means, probably, restoring some kind of Free Movement
I do wonder if he will go for it
Some sort of freedom of movement might be possible. The reality is that this exists already. I was doing a trial recently where one of the charges was attempting to pervert the course of justice. The accused was an Algerian but had been living here pretending to have been French (using false documents) and pretending to be covered by the transitional provisions applicable at the time of Brexit. Millions of people were granted such rights with very little inquiry and it does not take a lot of imagination to conclude that a fair number of these will have been for those wanting to sell a package of documentation to the likes of that Algerian.
I largely agree. I never had issues with Free Movement and it is now clear - as has been said on here - that neither party has any intention (or ability?) to really tackle mass immigration
So it is arguable we might as well get the benefits of the Single Market - perhaps
Pretty soon all the parties will be doing things to tackle mass immigration.
Not while the parties are convinced we need immigration to fill low-skilled jobs workshy Brits refuse, to do highly-skilled jobs like doctors and nurses that we don't train enough of and to counter the demographic timebomb. Something something Japan.
Truly back to 2015
Perhaps. But I await someone to propose an alternative: 1 Too many Brits are workshy. We have an attitude problem as a workforce compared to so many from eastern Europe and elsewhere. Despite a positive push of people out of the UK after Brexit, Brits haven't filled these jobs because they don't want them and never did. 2 Where we need skilled workers, we don't want to invest in training them. Things like the nursing bursary being cut are wholly counter-productive. "we can't afford it" ignores the costs of not having it, as usual. 3 I get repeatedly assured by PB Brexiteers that the likes of fruit farms should automate. Except that they can't because they don't have the money and the industry is financially a basket case. We have scrapped the hated CAP and replaced it with nothing. Farmers hated being told what to do for the money, voted to leave, and now have all the freedom but no actual money
Alternative: Pay people more.
If people are paid more then they will apply to do those jobs they don't want to do at shit wages (1).
If people are paid more and treated professionally, they'll get engaged with training (2).
If there's no money for training or investment then the businesses that are failing should go bust and someone else should be able to buy the land for a song and invest in productivity, whether it be investment in automation or investment in training professionals paid a decent salary.
If you're unproductive, you have no divine right for the government to solve your problems for you. That's a "you" problem.
I absolutely agree with this for the private sector.
For nursing it doesn't work though. You can't just say "If there's no money for training or investment then" health providers" should go bust.
The problem comes when we consider the food industry as a whole, which absolutely is necessary. If there is not enough food, people start to take things into their own hands. There seems to be a lot of weight heaped onto the assumption "and someone else should be able to buy the land for a song and invest in productivity, whether it be investment in automation or investment in training professionals paid a decent salary."
The public sector should be allowed FOM if they have gaps to fill. It’s the private sector’s exploitation of it that caused the public to back Brexit
First, good to see you back. I rarely agree with you but you present your viewpoint coherently.
Not for the first time, I don't wholly agree with you - the "public sector" isn't just specialist or niche jobs such as social workers - indeed, much of what the public sector does, the privatre sector does as well. The problem the public sector has it cannot pay private sector wages to recruit for example mechanical or electrical surveyors, solicitiors or arboriculturalists.
It is the professional skill shortages which are most damaging to the public sector - what happens in the property world is the newly-qualified estates surveyor will join the Council, gain experience while improving their professional qualifications via CPD and other things and then as soon as they've reached the next stage, they can go to a Savils or a Lambert Smith Hampton with their experience and get twice the money.
If the public sector is to be a training ground for the private sector, let's have that recognised and understood.
Greg Hands whining about Labour giving votes to 16 and 17 year olds . Accusing them of vote rigging ! From the party who brought in new voter ID which was aimed at disenfranchising opposition voters .
If you can join the army , have sex and work why are you too young to vote ?
Strange that there is so much horror about the BBC getting a car for Russell Brand’s 16yo girlfriend really
People might think it’s pervy dating a 16 year old but the law is the law . I find it strange that any woman would find Brand attractive .
Bit of an inopportune day for Lucy Powell to be going on about it being legal for 16yo to have sex, when the headlines are about the grooming of a 16yo.
Yes, I can’t stand him, but a lot of women seem(ed) to be desperate to have sex with him.
Is exactly the issue. He is an utter, utter tosser imo, with a far higher image of his own eg intellectual ability than he actually displays, but very important (and serious) rape convictions aside people who think he is a tosser shouldn't be allowed to shut him down.
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
As I said earlier joining the single market is the only way to change the EU, and anything else is cosmetic
And at the moment raising that issue is certain to rouse latent Brexit support from its slumber. Single Market is Freedom Of Movement. Single Market is putting all of those terrible Euroregulations back into British Law.
Personally, I'd be fine with that. I'd even be fine if we fully aligned indefinitely and waited for a monthly email from Brussels telling us what new stuff they've come up with for us. (The freedoms at a personal level seem worth it to me.) But it would send the right, and the press, dolally, and Starmer isn't going to touch the button marked "Pressing This Button Is Incredibly Risky". There are enough people who hate all that to give Rishi a liferaft he doesn't deserve.
It's going to be like I said in 2020.
The next thing we try, 2025ish, will be a TCA that realistically co-operates on trade. Vet agreements, standards marking, that sort of thing. It will help a bit, but no- not much. That looks like Starmer's plan. But he won't be PM forever.
Beyond that, it gets speculative, anything might happen, but I haven't seen anything to change my rough schedule.
Single Market will be 2030ish. We can probably chuck in some Union of Customs as well. The Brit deals aren't coming out with anything special, and we can leave CPTPP with six months notice.
And then, who knows? Maybe the UK will be fine tagging along with whatever Brussels says. A lot of it is boring technical stuff, and there is the possibility of being consulted. A bit. I don't think the UK political classes are going to be happy with that, which is why Rejoin might happen, but only under a new generation of politicians.
All a bit rubbish, because the UK is gently bleeding under the current arrangements. But I wouldn't have started here.
It will certainly take Labour not only winning the next general election and winning back most of the red wall seats but having a clear poll lead for re election to risk going back into the single market and restoring free movement again
You seem to have this strange inability to recognise opinion changes, and so does that in the red wall as they look like endorsing Starmer
The one issue that may well come into play next year is the increasing crisis in the Mediterranean and the present EU impasse on how to deal with it
The UK will not be involved in these discussions, but if the migrants keep coming and in increasing numbers as is likely, then a real immigration crisis will engulf the whole of Europe with untold consequences
Just by way of putting the numbers into perspective, fewer people have cross the Med this YEAR than crossed in a single month (October 2015) and it's not even close.
Whatever the urgency and the relative merits of this or that response, the situation was way, way more serious in 2015 than it is now.
Truss' complete disregard for the impact of her mini-budget, alongside the occasional person commenting that she wasn't given long enough to see if she was proven right, feels to me like the future of the Tory party is in the hands of Tufton Street. The consensus before she got in that she would be the change that was needed and the way many in right wing media have insulated her and have tried to help her with this rehabilitation tour is worrying to me.
I think it's clear that she was on her way to clown school when somehow she found herself elected as an MP. Quite how she managed to progress from there is baffling. (I'd not even venture a guess)
Because she knows the right people in the right places and parrots their words back to them. Did someone who went to uni with her not say that she was a LibDem until she started chatting to the political crowd there and then said that the only way to make a career out of politics was to join the Tories, so she did?
Truss' complete disregard for the impact of her mini-budget, alongside the occasional person commenting that she wasn't given long enough to see if she was proven right, feels to me like the future of the Tory party is in the hands of Tufton Street. The consensus before she got in that she would be the change that was needed and the way many in right wing media have insulated her and have tried to help her with this rehabilitation tour is worrying to me.
I think that's right. After the election assuming they lose it seems odds on the Tories will move to the right. It always happens, just as Labour moved to the left after 2010.
The question is which right? Which corner of the political compass do they head for? They have a choice of more national conservatism of the Goodwin sort, or more red in tooth and claw Redwood Tufton streetism, which seems far more likely. After all they experimented with the Red Wall then realised they could never deliver on either the autarchic economy or the levelling up that group were looking for. And they'll be desperate to get back at the Lib Dems in the home counties.
Tuftonism with a sprinkling of gerontocratic protection and local NIMBYism I think.
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
As I said earlier joining the single market is the only way to change the EU, and anything else is cosmetic
And at the moment raising that issue is certain to rouse latent Brexit support from its slumber. Single Market is Freedom Of Movement. Single Market is putting all of those terrible Euroregulations back into British Law.
Personally, I'd be fine with that. I'd even be fine if we fully aligned indefinitely and waited for a monthly email from Brussels telling us what new stuff they've come up with for us. (The freedoms at a personal level seem worth it to me.) But it would send the right, and the press, dolally, and Starmer isn't going to touch the button marked "Pressing This Button Is Incredibly Risky". There are enough people who hate all that to give Rishi a liferaft he doesn't deserve.
It's going to be like I said in 2020.
The next thing we try, 2025ish, will be a TCA that realistically co-operates on trade. Vet agreements, standards marking, that sort of thing. It will help a bit, but no- not much. That looks like Starmer's plan. But he won't be PM forever.
Beyond that, it gets speculative, anything might happen, but I haven't seen anything to change my rough schedule.
Single Market will be 2030ish. We can probably chuck in some Union of Customs as well. The Brit deals aren't coming out with anything special, and we can leave CPTPP with six months notice.
And then, who knows? Maybe the UK will be fine tagging along with whatever Brussels says. A lot of it is boring technical stuff, and there is the possibility of being consulted. A bit. I don't think the UK political classes are going to be happy with that, which is why Rejoin might happen, but only under a new generation of politicians.
All a bit rubbish, because the UK is gently bleeding under the current arrangements. But I wouldn't have started here.
But we’re not gently bleeding. We are growing faster than Germany and about the same speed as France
Britain is not in a great position but neither is much of Europe, or, indeed, the world
98% of our problems have nothing to do with Brexit and many of them are down to chronic, self inflicted stupidity and a dysfunctional government and civil service - eg HS2
Oh for goodness sake even if we were roaring away successful and Europe was going off a cliff edge that doesn't mean Brexit is successful. You have to compare what you have gained to what you have lost, not compare us with another country and go 'look they are having problems too'. About the only thing you did get right there is it isn't all about Brexit. There are lots of other stuff that has an impact making your observation utterly pointless. You can only look at the gains and losses.
So the question is has the improvements in exporting and importing to the rest of the world greater than the loss in importing and exporting to Europe. To my mind the answer to that question is very very clear.
If not do the freedoms/restrictions of being outside of Europe in other areas outweigh the freedoms/restrictions of being in Europe. And the answer to that question in my mind is even clearer.
How many times can we repeat this argument? For me, Brexit is Brexit
Regaining sovereignty and proper democracy is really all that I cared about. That’s been done. So for me it is a success. I understand that you differ
What about Britain out of the EU makes it a "proper democracy"? A party that fails to win a majority of votes can still receive a majority of seats. An individual seat is still won by FPTP. Our Commons is still whipped and cajoled by the leadership, and very few votes fall outside of that. A political consensus that drips from the media and tufton street still holds sway. Indeed, the two major parties of government have very little policy differences between them - one of them offering a shit future administered poorly and the other one offering a shit future administered efficiently.
The biggest single win from Brexit has been preventing politicans doing things which they may or may not want to do and saying "EU rules, nothing we can do other than comply".
I'd vote for Brexit again tomorrow, regardless of economic cost, in order to prevent them getting that nasty little figleaf back (most of the time it was things they wanted to do, but the public wouldn't wear). A democracy where the top elected politicans can plausibly claim they are being made to do things the voters don't want by a higher power is not a proper democracy by any standard.
So the reason to leave the EU that helps safeguard democracy, in your view, is that instead of blaming Brussels (falsely) for things, the government now have to take responsibility? How's that working out?
Considering that a huge amount of the blaming Brussels narrative was created as part of the lengthy campaign to get out of the EU, as were many of the stories and positions mischaracterising EU rules and such, you're claiming that we have saved democracy from the very people who threatened it by giving them what they wanted? Grand.
Trouble is we seem to have swapped the "its all Brussels's fault" for "Its all because of Brexit".
Neither is true.
I agree that not everything is Brussel's fault. I think the main fault is, of course, the neoliberal consensus and laissez-faire capitalism - but no one in the political mainstream can say that, so they have to find another scapegoat somewhere.
Greg Hands whining about Labour giving votes to 16 and 17 year olds . Accusing them of vote rigging ! From the party who brought in new voter ID which was aimed at disenfranchising opposition voters .
If you can join the army , have sex and work why are you too young to vote ?
Strange that there is so much horror about the BBC getting a car for Russell Brand’s 16yo girlfriend really
People might think it’s pervy dating a 16 year old but the law is the law . I find it strange that any woman would find Brand attractive .
Bit of an inopportune day for Lucy Powell to be going on about it being legal for 16yo to have sex, when the headlines are about the grooming of a 16yo.
Yes, I can’t stand him, but a lot of women seem(ed) to be desperate to have sex with him.
My eldest daughter was very fond of him at one point and her friend even more so. She kept trying to get me to read the Booky Wooky. Sadly, I never got around to it. My loss, no doubt.
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
There are some small changes that shouldn’t be too controversial and the EU would likely agree with . A large scale re-negotiation I agree is out of the question.
Ergo, one way or another, Starmer is lying. Not for the first time
He said he’d like to re-write the deal . We don’t know what if any changes are possible until we get to that point . Not sure it’s fair to accuse him of lying . The EU has a lot more goodwill towards Labour than the handmaidens of Brexit.
If you rule out SM/CU then the golden goose was really Horizon and Sunak has already plucked it. It may be possible to have more trusted trader schemes etc but that will make very little difference to 99.9% of the population.
Starmer made remarks about ‘getting a better EU deal for my kids’ and to me that means, probably, restoring some kind of Free Movement
I do wonder if he will go for it
Some sort of freedom of movement might be possible. The reality is that this exists already. I was doing a trial recently where one of the charges was attempting to pervert the course of justice. The accused was an Algerian but had been living here pretending to have been French (using false documents) and pretending to be covered by the transitional provisions applicable at the time of Brexit. Millions of people were granted such rights with very little inquiry and it does not take a lot of imagination to conclude that a fair number of these will have been for those wanting to sell a package of documentation to the likes of that Algerian.
I largely agree. I never had issues with Free Movement and it is now clear - as has been said on here - that neither party has any intention (or ability?) to really tackle mass immigration
So it is arguable we might as well get the benefits of the Single Market - perhaps
Pretty soon all the parties will be doing things to tackle mass immigration.
Not while the parties are convinced we need immigration to fill low-skilled jobs workshy Brits refuse, to do highly-skilled jobs like doctors and nurses that we don't train enough of and to counter the demographic timebomb. Something something Japan.
Truly back to 2015
Perhaps. But I await someone to propose an alternative: 1 Too many Brits are workshy. We have an attitude problem as a workforce compared to so many from eastern Europe and elsewhere. Despite a positive push of people out of the UK after Brexit, Brits haven't filled these jobs because they don't want them and never did. 2 Where we need skilled workers, we don't want to invest in training them. Things like the nursing bursary being cut are wholly counter-productive. "we can't afford it" ignores the costs of not having it, as usual. 3 I get repeatedly assured by PB Brexiteers that the likes of fruit farms should automate. Except that they can't because they don't have the money and the industry is financially a basket case. We have scrapped the hated CAP and replaced it with nothing. Farmers hated being told what to do for the money, voted to leave, and now have all the freedom but no actual money
Alternative: Pay people more.
If people are paid more then they will apply to do those jobs they don't want to do at shit wages (1).
If people are paid more and treated professionally, they'll get engaged with training (2).
If there's no money for training or investment then the businesses that are failing should go bust and someone else should be able to buy the land for a song and invest in productivity, whether it be investment in automation or investment in training professionals paid a decent salary.
If you're unproductive, you have no divine right for the government to solve your problems for you. That's a "you" problem.
I absolutely agree with this for the private sector.
For nursing it doesn't work though. You can't just say "If there's no money for training or investment then" health providers" should go bust.
The problem comes when we consider the food industry as a whole, which absolutely is necessary. If there is not enough food, people start to take things into their own hands. There seems to be a lot of weight heaped onto the assumption "and someone else should be able to buy the land for a song and invest in productivity, whether it be investment in automation or investment in training professionals paid a decent salary."
The public sector should be allowed FOM if they have gaps to fill. It’s the private sector’s exploitation of it that caused the public to back Brexit
First, good to see you back. I rarely agree with you but you present your viewpoint coherently.
Not for the first time, I don't wholly agree with you - the "public sector" isn't just specialist or niche jobs such as social workers - indeed, much of what the public sector does, the privatre sector does as well. The problem the public sector has it cannot pay private sector wages to recruit for example mechanical or electrical surveyors, solicitiors or arboriculturalists.
It is the professional skill shortages which are most damaging to the public sector - what happens in the property world is the newly-qualified estates surveyor will join the Council, gain experience while improving their professional qualifications via CPD and other things and then as soon as they've reached the next stage, they can go to a Savils or a Lambert Smith Hampton with their experience and get twice the money.
If the public sector is to be a training ground for the private sector, let's have that recognised and understood.
Thanks, well to be clear, public sector was shorthand for nurses/teachers/firemen really
Truss' complete disregard for the impact of her mini-budget, alongside the occasional person commenting that she wasn't given long enough to see if she was proven right, feels to me like the future of the Tory party is in the hands of Tufton Street. The consensus before she got in that she would be the change that was needed and the way many in right wing media have insulated her and have tried to help her with this rehabilitation tour is worrying to me.
I think that's right. After the election assuming they lose it seems odds on the Tories will move to the right. It always happens, just as Labour moved to the left after 2010.
The question is which right? Which corner of the political compass do they head for? They have a choice of more national conservatism of the Goodwin sort, or more red in tooth and claw Redwood Tufton streetism, which seems far more likely. After all they experimented with the Red Wall then realised they could never deliver on either the autarchic economy or the levelling up that group were looking for. And they'll be desperate to get back at the Lib Dems in the home counties.
Tuftonism with a sprinkling of gerontocratic protection and local NIMBYism I think.
I think they'll go full Goodwin with a side of anti-green policy and talk less about economics (because the point of going full Goodwin is to win votes without having to talk economics) and still do the full market libertarianism they want anyway.
Greg Hands whining about Labour giving votes to 16 and 17 year olds . Accusing them of vote rigging ! From the party who brought in new voter ID which was aimed at disenfranchising opposition voters .
If you can join the army , have sex and work why are you too young to vote ?
Strange that there is so much horror about the BBC getting a car for Russell Brand’s 16yo girlfriend really
People might think it’s pervy dating a 16 year old but the law is the law . I find it strange that any woman would find Brand attractive .
Bit of an inopportune day for Lucy Powell to be going on about it being legal for 16yo to have sex, when the headlines are about the grooming of a 16yo.
Yes, I can’t stand him, but a lot of women seem(ed) to be desperate to have sex with him.
My eldest daughter was very fond of him at one point and her friend even more so. She kept trying to get me to read the Booky Wooky. Sadly, I never got around to it. My loss, no doubt.
A girl I was seeing likes him, and so as not to be a complete fun sponge, I tried reading that nonsense - it was nonsense, I got to about page twenty
A friend of mine used to date Russell Brand’s make up artist - it shows how easily people are dazzled by fame, Brand drew a picture of a Willy on my mates arm with their names next to it, & my normally sensible ish friend thought it was absolutely hilarious, getting quite upset with me when I said I didnt see what was funny about it, and neither would he if one of the blokes in the pub had drawn it
“Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir's repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.. If your bottom line is that you do not wish to rejoin the single market and the customs union, there really is not a lot more out there.”
Starmer has ruled out SM/CU. There is, in that case, nothing to be done. The EU is not interested in rolling over to give Starmer a special deal. Why would it?
His Labour government is going to collide with the tank traps of reality very quickly
As I said earlier joining the single market is the only way to change the EU, and anything else is cosmetic
And at the moment raising that issue is certain to rouse latent Brexit support from its slumber. Single Market is Freedom Of Movement. Single Market is putting all of those terrible Euroregulations back into British Law.
Personally, I'd be fine with that. I'd even be fine if we fully aligned indefinitely and waited for a monthly email from Brussels telling us what new stuff they've come up with for us. (The freedoms at a personal level seem worth it to me.) But it would send the right, and the press, dolally, and Starmer isn't going to touch the button marked "Pressing This Button Is Incredibly Risky". There are enough people who hate all that to give Rishi a liferaft he doesn't deserve.
It's going to be like I said in 2020.
The next thing we try, 2025ish, will be a TCA that realistically co-operates on trade. Vet agreements, standards marking, that sort of thing. It will help a bit, but no- not much. That looks like Starmer's plan. But he won't be PM forever.
Beyond that, it gets speculative, anything might happen, but I haven't seen anything to change my rough schedule.
Single Market will be 2030ish. We can probably chuck in some Union of Customs as well. The Brit deals aren't coming out with anything special, and we can leave CPTPP with six months notice.
And then, who knows? Maybe the UK will be fine tagging along with whatever Brussels says. A lot of it is boring technical stuff, and there is the possibility of being consulted. A bit. I don't think the UK political classes are going to be happy with that, which is why Rejoin might happen, but only under a new generation of politicians.
All a bit rubbish, because the UK is gently bleeding under the current arrangements. But I wouldn't have started here.
But we’re not gently bleeding. We are growing faster than Germany and about the same speed as France
Britain is not in a great position but neither is much of Europe, or, indeed, the world
98% of our problems have nothing to do with Brexit and many of them are down to chronic, self inflicted stupidity and a dysfunctional government and civil service - eg HS2
Oh for goodness sake even if we were roaring away successful and Europe was going off a cliff edge that doesn't mean Brexit is successful. You have to compare what you have gained to what you have lost, not compare us with another country and go 'look they are having problems too'. About the only thing you did get right there is it isn't all about Brexit. There are lots of other stuff that has an impact making your observation utterly pointless. You can only look at the gains and losses.
So the question is has the improvements in exporting and importing to the rest of the world greater than the loss in importing and exporting to Europe. To my mind the answer to that question is very very clear.
If not do the freedoms/restrictions of being outside of Europe in other areas outweigh the freedoms/restrictions of being in Europe. And the answer to that question in my mind is even clearer.
How many times can we repeat this argument? For me, Brexit is Brexit
Regaining sovereignty and proper democracy is really all that I cared about. That’s been done. So for me it is a success. I understand that you differ
What about Britain out of the EU makes it a "proper democracy"? A party that fails to win a majority of votes can still receive a majority of seats. An individual seat is still won by FPTP. Our Commons is still whipped and cajoled by the leadership, and very few votes fall outside of that. A political consensus that drips from the media and tufton street still holds sway. Indeed, the two major parties of government have very little policy differences between them - one of them offering a shit future administered poorly and the other one offering a shit future administered efficiently.
The biggest single win from Brexit has been preventing politicans doing things which they may or may not want to do and saying "EU rules, nothing we can do other than comply".
I'd vote for Brexit again tomorrow, regardless of economic cost, in order to prevent them getting that nasty little figleaf back (most of the time it was things they wanted to do, but the public wouldn't wear). A democracy where the top elected politicans can plausibly claim they are being made to do things the voters don't want by a higher power is not a proper democracy by any standard.
So the reason to leave the EU that helps safeguard democracy, in your view, is that instead of blaming Brussels (falsely) for things, the government now have to take responsibility? How's that working out?
Considering that a huge amount of the blaming Brussels narrative was created as part of the lengthy campaign to get out of the EU, as were many of the stories and positions mischaracterising EU rules and such, you're claiming that we have saved democracy from the very people who threatened it by giving them what they wanted? Grand.
Trouble is we seem to have swapped the "its all Brussels's fault" for "Its all because of Brexit".
Neither is true.
I agree that not everything is Brussel's fault. I think the main fault is, of course, the neoliberal consensus and laissez-faire capitalism - but no one in the political mainstream can say that, so they have to find another scapegoat somewhere.
For a second I thought you had invented a neologism for Russell Brand - Brussell - before I realised you were talking about the EU.
Greg Hands whining about Labour giving votes to 16 and 17 year olds . Accusing them of vote rigging ! From the party who brought in new voter ID which was aimed at disenfranchising opposition voters .
If you can join the army , have sex and work why are you too young to vote ?
Strange that there is so much horror about the BBC getting a car for Russell Brand’s 16yo girlfriend really
People might think it’s pervy dating a 16 year old but the law is the law . I find it strange that any woman would find Brand attractive .
Bit of an inopportune day for Lucy Powell to be going on about it being legal for 16yo to have sex, when the headlines are about the grooming of a 16yo.
Yes, I can’t stand him, but a lot of women seem(ed) to be desperate to have sex with him.
Is exactly the issue. He is an utter, utter tosser imo, with a far higher image of his own eg intellectual ability than he actually displays, but very important (and serious) rape convictions aside people who think he is a tosser shouldn't be allowed to shut him down.
Doesn't Andrew Tate demonstrate that rape accusations and worse doesn't shut anyone down, in fact it amplifies their puerile guff? These people and their fans thrive on paranoia & persecution (and prosecution).
Comments
I wonder if a nuclear order would actually be carried out, or if that would precipitate 'internal struggles'.
If people are paid more then they will apply to do those jobs they don't want to do at shit wages (1).
If people are paid more and treated professionally, they'll get engaged with training (2).
If there's no money for training or investment then the businesses that are failing should go bust and someone else should be able to buy the land for a song and invest in productivity, whether it be investment in automation or investment in training professionals paid a decent salary.
If you're unproductive, you have no divine right for the government to solve your problems for you. That's a "you" problem.
Net over that period the BoE were tightening things, not loosening them, as the media portrayed.
Truss's problems were far more media management than economic. She was stupid to bundle her ambitions in at the same time as the energy bailout, and the same time as the Bank were announcing tightening, as the markets would have reacted either way - but by headlining with what was actually some pretty minor changes to taxes which could and should have waited for a proper Budget she took ownership of the whole disaster.
pandemic probably weren’t ideal conditions
They were bringing in trainload of munitions, keeping them close to the train station, then the entire lot were getting blown up by Ukrainian missiles.
Ammunition getting destroyed in storage means a much, much faster depletion in stocks than they'd probably accounted for.
Ukraine learnt very quickly from one early offensive in June that it couldn't just charge a load of Western tanks/IFVs at Russian defences. They have since been waging a war of attrition against Russia. It is slow but it does seem to be working. Russia has less and less gear even if it still does have lots of manpower. The gear that it has is of car worse quality than what it could use at the start of the war.
Even in manpower it is becoming a struggle for Russia. They are now manning their defence with elite offensive units. Why would they do this unless they had no other choice? Those units will not be used again for offensive operations.
Ukraine is also becoming more and more adapt with its long range weapons. The Black Sea is almost a no-go area now for Russian warships as has been seen over the last week.
It is a long process but I do not see many positives for Russia. It is bloody for Ukraine but things are slowly moving in their direction.
My working assumption, would be that every Ukranian and international air defence would launch to intercept the missile, including NATO assets. If there was actually a hit from a small nuclear bomb, then we have WWIII and NATO responds accordingly, probably with an immediate but conventional strike on a predetermined list of Russian military targets, that includes nuclear bases, the Black Sea fleet, and government buildings in Moscow.
Part of the problem is that the markets were horribly mispriced last year. They hadn't properly accounted for the global disruptions, inflationary pressures and the cost of energy bailouts etc
And Truss's announcements started the process of pulling back the curtain on that, which led to a shock, but the shock would have happened either way. The price rises were due either way.
Truss screwed up by lumping all her stuff in with what should have been standalone pieces, and in doing so she acted as a human shield. It was stupid politics, stupid media management, more than stupid economics.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/newslondon/outdated-electoral-registration-rules-mean-8m-could-miss-out-on-right-to-vote/ar-AA1gSRag
Private renters, young'uns, ethnic minorities mainly.
If all you ever read is Russian language Telegram output you'd think the Ukrainians are fucked and are on the verge of total collapse.
The Centrist Dad's Army on here do the former. In reality, nobody really knows what the fuck is happening. Least of all those who are getting their balls, face and knock-off Adidas trainers blown off in the mud.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/mp-dehenna-davison-tory-levelling-up-minister-migraine-b1107753.html
The other issue is what is going to change things now?
As long as the West keeps supporting Ukraine, their supply of modern infrastructure and superior equipment and logistics should keep them escalating their advantage over Russia.
What's going to change things in Russia's favour?
About the only thing I can see that would is a change of POTUS, but we're about a year and a half from that impacting on the battlefield.
Say 3x the length of the stay. So a Thatcher or Blair honour lasts 30 odd years, Cameron 16 years, Brown, May or Boris 10 years and Truss just under 5 months.
Territory illegally occupied by Russia: 157,500 sq. km.
Only 30, she probably can't afford to be unemployed for too long.
If she does have that, it’s bloody horrible.
Apparently the favourite in the Slovak election has pledged to stop providing any support for Ukraine. People might scoff at Slovakia's size, but Ukraine has an important joint-venture with them that is delivering new self-propelled artillery, and they've been a firm supporter of Ukraine to this point.
You can't talk yourself into winning a war you are losing, but you can talk yourself into losing a war that you are winning - and I think that's what Leon (and others) are doing.
That your opponents don't accept defeat is politics. She shouldn't have given them the opportunity she did.
Had the announcement in the mini budget been purely the the energy bailout etc that were to be welcomed by the public, and the Bank's Tightening been done separately from any political policies, then the market turmoil would be simply part of the global situation.
Instead she acted like a human shield, ran headfirst into landmines, and got picked apart by Sunak's snipers. She stupidly gave them the chance to get victory from defeat.
Which is why we need to get the small boat people into the cotton fields as quickly as possible.
#LibyanCoastguardEmploymentServices
Who’d a thunk it!
I spent a couple of weeks knocking doors for her in Corby in 2010, only to see her **** off to America two years later.
Whilst I do have medication it still knocks you out for a day or so and certainly can effect your work as they hit you suddenly and without warning
People who've moved aren't registered yet is about as shocking as it raining in England.
People who haven't moved are registered is about as shocking as the sun rising in the East.
People need to register that they've moved address, many don't bother immediately, but before every election there's a surge of people registering in time to vote.
I myself moved late last year but only registered to vote days before the deadline for the local elections this year, because that prompted it. Never lost my vote though, despite for a few months being "registered at the wrong address".
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/londoners-diary/louise-mensch-makes-a-tweet-of-herself-over-antisemitism-9676272.html
Cummings called it very early on, describing her as "As close to properly mental to anyone I ever met in Wesminster."
https://twitter.com/ArkadiuszMolis1/status/1703679958361457094
https://twitter.com/ArkadiuszMolis1/status/1703501800588845519
Quite a rebuild job...
So you have to weave your way through the minefield of misinformation to reach an informed guess - and it is only a guess - as to what is happening. And my guess is: stalemate
However I do see some hopeful signs for Ukraine. The death of Prigozhin and now, allegedly, Kadyrov - both close allies of Putin, bring assassination ever closer to Vlad himself. He must be paranoid as fuck
Hopefully someone will slot him, asafp
God knows why you do it - probably just because you can't resist being a troll - but what you really do is your best impression of someone halfway up Putin's ****.
The tripe you post is no closer to an objective reflection of the facts than the most wildly over-optimistic propaganda coming from the other side.
Tldr: Russia is reactivating a lot of old tanks, and if Ukraine is to win, they need the West to keep up the flow of munitions.
It would be objective to say we don't know yet if its going to happen or not, but there's no objective reason to say it won't happen.
What Truss did, that scared the markets, was dramatically increase spending, specifically on a ridiculously generous energy scheme, and decrease taxes at the same time without any explanation from the OBR as to how this was going to work out. An insolvency or run away inflation as we printed more money to pay the bills seemed likely scenarios and the market panicked. Hunt was able to calm them down again by cancelling the tax cuts, massively cutting back on the energy subsidy and getting the OBR to sign off on it.
Since then the international situation has deteriorated with the inflationary consequences of energy subsidy coming to bear forcing central banks to increase base rates very substantially and moving back into a more "normal" interest rate world. The first crisis was home made and down to Truss. The ongoing crisis is one we share with nearly all western nations to varying degrees.
For nursing it doesn't work though. You can't just say "If there's no money for training or investment then" health providers" should go bust.
The problem comes when we consider the food industry as a whole, which absolutely is necessary. If there is not enough food, people start to take things into their own hands. There seems to be a lot of weight heaped onto the assumption
"and someone else should be able to buy the land for a song and invest in productivity, whether it be investment in automation or investment in training professionals paid a decent salary."
Any PM would have needed to do some sort of energy bailout, its why every country did one and that cost has come to bear, yes.
Where Truss was stupid was mixing her own policies in with the bailout which meant the entire poison of the energy scheme got lambasted as being due to her incredibly tiny in comparison tax changes.
Its was beyond stupid politics, but economically some sort of energy bailout would have been required either way and the cost of that would have had an impact either way, which is what we've seen.
If British food is competitive then prices would rise accordingly which would fund the investments needed.
Or if British food is uncompetitive then imports would rise accordingly, which would mean food remains on the shelf, in which case the failed businesses domestically can be replaced with new ones that will invest and look to regain market share.
This is presumably part of the motivation for Dimon's extremely verbose but carefully calibrated bellicosity on Telegram. He does not want to seem of that ultra-nationalist think tank milieu but he also does not want to seem not of it.
The idea that all would have been sunshine and roses if it weren't for some pretty minor tax changes that got rolled back (its worth noting the one big tax change, abolishing the NIC Surcharge, was kept) is pretty silly.
Politically she took all the flak because she exposed herself by going in like a rash two footed challenge in football . . . but the flak would have happened in the markets, and has happened in the market, either way.
It is definitely undemocratic when the rules to register make it difficult for those who belong to a specific demographic (almost by definition). The the demographic group being disadvantaged here are those people who, as a group, move house frequently. The fact that you managed to "not lose your vote" does not mean that the majority were as proactive as you were.
That people haven't bothered is a different kettle of fish to it being difficult.
Every single election people are proactive and register. Anyone who doesn't, almost certainly has no intention to vote anyway.
I think your guess of a stalemate is a superficial conclusion that ignores the signs of degradation of the Russian military that are occurring. A degradation that makes a stalemate unlikely.
I find it strange that you would be making this point when early September may well go down as a crucial turning point in the war. We can now see that Russia cannot protect its ships at dock in Sevastopol, nor can it enforce a blockade of Ukrainian ports.
These are massive signs of the war moving in Ukraine's favour and that Russia's hold on Crimea is untenable (and also pointless - if they can't use Sevastopol as a base for their Black Sea Fleet then what good is it to them?)
Next?
Vlad getting presented with the NATO recruiter of the year award.
Less impressed that I cannot - it seems - set my monthly DD payment via the website.
But an email request has been actioned within 2 hours.
Many on here think there will be a reduced turnout next time as those dilllusioned with all parties voice their mutual contempt by not bothering to vote or spoiling the ballot paper.
It should also be remembered the whole registration system was brought in, supposedly, to cure a problem which in fact didn't exist. The amount of electoral fraud is infinitesimal against the number of votes and it's less those turning up to vote rather than the postal vote system which is where most of the malpractice has been found. I think there's a case for tightening the postal voting system especially, unfortunately, among care home residents.
Other than that, the system works well and the personation problems famously recorded in Ulster - "vote early, vote often" - just aren't found either. I'm not a big fan of the ID requirement - again, no evidence the basic system is being defrauded or manipulated in any way. As Mrs Stodge points out, she now has to take her UK passport to vote because she has no other acceptable form of photo ID.
I hope both Labour and the LDs pledge to sweep all this nonsense away but with the caveat of stronger checks on postal and proxy voting.
If you can join the army , have sex and work why are you too young to vote ?
As for why it fell apart, that's somewhere on the spectrum of "shadowy forces did it to Truss" to "Truss did it to herself". I incline towards the latter; the idea that Rishi (yes that Rishi) was a ruthless political operator for just long enough to stab Truss before returning to his normal state isn't really plausible. I accept that others disagree.
But it doesn't really matter. Politics is about perception at least as much as reality, and the national perception of Truss is "crazy lady who nearly bankrupted us". It doesn't matter if that's fair or true, it's already stuck.
Truss speaking in favour of tax cuts will probably move the dial towards people thinking tax rises are a good idea.
The one issue that may well come into play next year is the increasing crisis in the Mediterranean and the present EU impasse on how to deal with it
The UK will not be involved in these discussions, but if the migrants keep coming and in increasing numbers as is likely, then a real immigration crisis will engulf the whole of Europe with untold consequences
Unless you go down the Australian route of making voting mandatory and making it against the law anyone who doesn't register and issuing them fines for not doing so, then there will be millions of people who just don't bother to register immediately, if ever.
And this isn't a change due to individual registration, it was just as much an issue under the old system too.
People need to bother. It takes less than five minutes to do so, and couldn't be easier, but if they choose not to bother then that's their choice.
If you can now update your voters register details online/with a smartphone, that is a big improvement. Is the register still fixed for the calendar year?
"Every single election people are proactive and register." This is not true in the UK. If you are registered and do not move your details are rolled forward. So it is not "every single election" it is "every single house move".
Considering that a huge amount of the blaming Brussels narrative was created as part of the lengthy campaign to get out of the EU, as were many of the stories and positions mischaracterising EU rules and such, you're claiming that we have saved democracy from the very people who threatened it by giving them what they wanted? Grand.
Yes, I can’t stand him, but a lot of women seem(ed) to be desperate to have sex with him.
Neither is true.
Not for the first time, I don't wholly agree with you - the "public sector" isn't just specialist or niche jobs such as social workers - indeed, much of what the public sector does, the privatre sector does as well. The problem the public sector has it cannot pay private sector wages to recruit for example mechanical or electrical surveyors, solicitiors or arboriculturalists.
It is the professional skill shortages which are most damaging to the public sector - what happens in the property world is the newly-qualified estates surveyor will join the Council, gain experience while improving their professional qualifications via CPD and other things and then as soon as they've reached the next stage, they can go to a Savils or a Lambert Smith Hampton with their experience and get twice the money.
If the public sector is to be a training ground for the private sector, let's have that recognised and understood.
Whatever the urgency and the relative merits of this or that response, the situation was way, way more serious in 2015 than it is now.
The question is which right? Which corner of the political compass do they head for? They have a choice of more national conservatism of the Goodwin sort, or more red in tooth and claw Redwood Tufton streetism, which seems far more likely. After all they experimented with the Red Wall then realised they could never deliver on either the autarchic economy or the levelling up that group were looking for. And they'll be desperate to get back at the Lib Dems in the home counties.
Tuftonism with a sprinkling of gerontocratic protection and local NIMBYism I think.
A friend of mine used to date Russell Brand’s make up artist - it shows how easily people are dazzled by fame, Brand drew a picture of a Willy on my mates arm with their names next to it, & my normally sensible ish friend thought it was absolutely hilarious, getting quite upset with me when I said I didnt see what was funny about it, and neither would he if one of the blokes in the pub had drawn it